


i don't blame you much (for wanting to be free)

by The_Blonde



Series: do what you gotta do [1]
Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Break Up, Slow Build, art heist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-06-05 22:23:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 47,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6725836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Blonde/pseuds/The_Blonde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Phil first saw Dan, in a tiny museum in Manchester, wearing a nametag that said Dylan, cleaning one tiny patch of floor over and over, fringe falling in his eyes, staring at The Sea at Saintes-Maries like it was the best thing he had ever seen, like he was looking at something behind it, something hidden. Phil had said, “hey, that’s my favourite too. Everyone always walks straight past it,” and Dan had jumped like a startled cat and then instantly scurried off.</p><p>Phil had thought no wait stay.</p><p>And Dan hadn’t, obviously."</p><p>Or: Art Thief Dans and the Phils who love them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Again I meant for this to be shorter. Now it's actual chapters and everything.
> 
> Title from Nina Simone's "Do What You Gotta Do". (Or Kanye West's "Famous", if you're Dan.)
> 
> (actually, if you're Dan please stop reading now.)

Dan is in the Camden flat when Felix phones; of all the safe houses it’s his favourite (small but not too small, homely because Marzia took charge of the furnishings, quiet enough that he won’t be bothered), which is why he’s somehow ended up spending two months there, rather than the standard two weeks. He’s up early, too early, because of an unexpected John Singer Sargent “delivery” (now propped up in the hallway), and is far too tired for this whole conversation.

He tells Felix, “I can’t. I’m going straight.”

Felix says, “You’ve never been straight.”

“I meant, as in no longer living a life of crime.”

“I don’t think you’ve ever done that either.”

“I’m being serious.”

“So am I” - a lie, Felix is never serious. His voice has a laugh in it continuously. It used to charm Dan but now it just sounds completely obnoxious. “One last job, then I’ll let you go and do whatever the fuck it is that you want to do.”

Dan says, “You don’t get to _let me_ do anything.”

“Please, one job. I know you messed the last one up but - I really want it.”

Felix “really wants” lots of things. Dan is staring at a Monet (hung haphazardly over the Camden Flat sofa) right at this moment, all vibrant blues, lighting up the room. Felix has probably forgotten that it even exists. “Like how you really wanted the Wisteria?”

“Huh?”

“The Monet currently hanging in your flat? The one Alfie nearly got arrested for? The one you _really wanted_ from The Gemeentenmuseum? That one?”

“Oh, _that_ , of course," Felix is not convincing. “But this, this new one, I REALLY want. Not even for a buyer, just for me. Then that’s it; I’ll give you what you’ve earnt and you can go. Easy as that. You can pick the team and everything.”

Dan says, “I told you. I’m not doing it anymore.”

“Is this after what happened in Manchester? Because I have some-”

“This has nothing to do with that. And I think we also said that we’d never mention it again.”

“But it’s why I think you’ll find this job interesting,” Felix lets that sit in the air for a moment. 

Dan lets it sit too. He has a vague idea of where this is going and would rather delay the answer as soon as possible.

“ _He’s_ there,” says Felix, triumphantly.

“And that’s supposed to make me want to do this?” Dan replies. He really wants to say but how? I thought that he’d got arrested because of me. I thought he’d lost his job. “He knows _who I am_.”

“Which is why all of that shit happened,” says Felix, thoughtfully. “Think about it. I don’t want anyone else to do it.”

“I have thought about it.”

“If he hasn’t told on you now then he’s never going to.”

“And I said no.”

There’s a long pause; Felix isn’t often said no to. Dan takes advantage and hangs up.

~*~

The last job got messed up because Dan wasn’t concentrating and ended up slicing straight through a Degas when trying to extract it from its frame. It’s not one of his favourites (A Cotton Office in New Orleans, pretty bland really. He prefers the dancers) but he’s completely aghast anyway. He may spend a lot of time stealing art but that doesn’t mean he can’t appreciate it. Louise, who he’d been working with on that particular escapade, had made a wounded little noise like she was feeling the painting’s pain. They’d stared at it for a while, difficult as they were both hanging upside down (not the type of job Dan usually likes as it requires too much physical activity).

“Leave it,” Louise hissed. “I’ll tell Felix that the guards disturbed us. I’ll say there was an extra alarm that we missed.”

“He won’t believe us,” Dan hissed back, poor defaced Degas still in his gloved hands. “Not if you’re here, you wouldn’t miss an alarm.”

“And you would?”

“Probably _yes_ ,” Dan’s overall success is mostly a complete mystery to him. “What do we do?”

Louise tried hard not to look annoyed, he could tell, her left eyelid was twitching. A month of build-up, monitoring the location, hacking alarm systems, tailing security guards, guides, guests (all Louise, Dan had mostly been moping because of the Manchester thing) all blown at the last minute because he hadn’t been concentrating. She sighed and said, “Hang it back up.”

“Really?”

“It’s unsellable now,” Louise shrugged, which looked slightly odd when upside down. “What can we do with it?”

“But -” Dan had felt suddenly sorry for the Degas. He wanted to take it anyway, hang it in a home that he doesn’t have. “What will they do with it?”

“Restore it? Put it in the archives?” Louise was over the whole conversation. “We’re getting close to our five minutes, hang it and I’ll zip us up.”

Dan had whispered sorry when he re-hung the Degas, had patted the frame a little. He’s stolen a lot, _a lot_ , but somehow knowing that he’s probably confined a painting to the archives, the art graveyard, makes him sadder than anything he has ever done. Except that one thing. 

The frame patting made them late, missed the delay Louise had put on the alarm system, and resulted in a midnight run across the Musee des Beaux-Arts’ several layers of beautiful, flower filled gardens. Not that he’d been appreciating them at the time. 

It ended up on the cover of La Tribune International and Le Monde, including a photo of them (Dan mid awkward run) on garden number three. Thankfully Louise’s (perfectly blow-dried and curled even after the running) hair was obscuring both of their faces (because she’d been turning towards him and yelling _this is your fault Howell_ , if he remembers correctly).

Felix had appeared, suddenly, in the seat next to him at a cafe in Pau, and said, “Lazy work. Even for you.”

Dan had wanted to say I’m not lazy but that was a complete lie so he just glared at Felix for a while over his continental breakfast.

Felix ordered the fruit platter (in impeccable French) and said, “I’m putting you in the Camden flat. Marzia says you’re not in the right frame of mind. Please appreciate that pun.”

Dan did not. “I’m fine, I just lost concentration.”

Felix produced train tickets. “Camden flat. Marzia will worry. I know it’s your favourite.”

Dan had said, “There’s nothing for her to worry _about_ ” and Felix had made a completely disbelieving noise around a wedge of watermelon.

Dan had to concede that one. When he got to the Camden flat Marzia (obviously Marzia, who else?) had set up the Steinway with a note saying _play it. No one else does_ and had fully stocked the kitchen so that he didn’t have to go out.

He hadn’t played the piano though. The beauty of it intimidated him,like it would sigh disapprovingly if he missed a key (like his ex-piano teacher). He mostly stared at it from afar, as with most things that he really wants.

~*~

Felix phones back, of course. “Tyler’s on board. And PJ. I can probably talk Louise into it; it’ll be like old times.”

Dan says “Where?” which is not a yes, though Felix seems to take it as one. 

“The Tate Modern”

“The _Tate_?” Dan hates The Tate. “What’s the painting?”

“Llama in Meadow”

Dan pauses. Felix pauses. Even the sirens outside seem to stop. Dan says, slowly, delicately, “Llama in Meadow?”

“It’s part of a new collection, some artist from Iceland. Her stuff is selling fast; if I can get this -”

“ _Llama in Meadow_?” Scratch everything else, all the Monets, Picassos, Rembrandts,  this is the only thing Dan will hang in his non-existent home. 

“So, you’re interested?”

“I hate The Tate. It’s impossible.”

“I don’t plan the heists, Daniel - that’s what I employ you for.”

“Employ?”

Felix lowers his tone. “I’ll give you enough to quit. I promise. Get me that painting and I’ll give you as much as you want - enough for you to do anything. You can go and have a normal, boring life, whatever.”

Dan, standing in a flat in Camden, with two million pound paintings, priceless sculptures on all the tables and Steinway in the middle of the living room (casting a foreboding shadow over everything), says, flatly, “A normal life.”

“Yeah, whatever you want, sport. I’ll cut you loose. I’ll give you the Camden flat. I’ll never contact you again. Even though you’d probably miss me.”

Dan is starting to lose resolve. He knows Felix can sense it. “I’ll have to go and see it first, you know that. Get a sense of -”

“I’ll come with you,” Felix’s voice is coaxing because he knows that he’s won, completely unsurprised because he always does. “I need to see it again anyway.”

~*~

Felix is wearing a green suit with a huge, obviously expensive, gold scarf. He looks like a Quality Street, but then he usually does (or some variation on that theme). Dan has no idea how he carries it off.

Felix says, “He’s not here. I checked.”

Dan is both glad and not so glad. He shrugs, “It doesn’t matter.”

Llama in Meadow has a crowd of people around it, which is unexpected. Dan takes the time to look at some of the artist’s other work, which is all far too bright and cheerful for his aesthetic. Everything looks unfinished, not in a good arty way, but like she gave up halfway through every single thing. Which Dan can relate to, kind of. 

Not kind of, he can completely relate. The whole show is an exhibition for his life. 

He’s looking at a landscape, except it looks more like half a landscape, with trees without leaves and flowers with no stalks, and is just starting to warm up to her theme when Felix grabs him by the elbow and pulls him in front of their target.

Llama in Meadow is both the ugliest thing he’s ever seen and also the first thing he wants to see every morning. It’s awful in the most beautiful way. It’s black and white, mostly, with the meadow flowers sudden explosions of colour, all of which clash with each other. The llama him/herself has slightly wonky legs but a proud stance. It looks like it’s winking, but that could just be because the eyes aren’t painted level. It's llama facial expression is challenging, like it might charge out of the frame. The background has both stars and the sun.

Dan turns to Felix, who is staring at the painting with an expression of complete awe on his face. “Fine.” 

“Fine?” says Felix. “I knew you would when you saw it - isn’t it amazing?”

“I have no idea _what_ it is,” Dan replies, honestly.

~*~

He’d studied Law at university, which is ridiculous, he knows. His parents may be under the impression that he still is. Not that he’s actively lied, just laid gentle suggestions that he might have taken a few gap years. Or was taking some time out to work with a friend to gain experience.

He met PJ first. They’d had to pick partners for some assignment or other (the fact that he can’t remember what probably sums up his university experience) and he’d picked PJ because he looked so completely unassuming, with his curls and his soft knit jumpers. Which had been completely wrong. 

They’d met at PJ’s flat and Dan noticed that he had Picasso’s Girl Before A Mirror hanging in his hallway. PJ had looked horrified (in a rare lapse of concentration, he’d forgotten to take it down.)

Dan had said, “Hey - that’s an amazing copy. It looks real.”

PJ had said “Uh…..” and didn’t even attempt to lie. 

And it had pretty much got out of hand from there.

~*~

PJ says, “I went to that exhibition yesterday. It’s the worst painting I’ve ever seen.”

“Hey,” says Dan, affronted on behalf of the poor wonky eyed llama. “It’s not so bad. The more you look at it the more you see….” his voice trails off. “Or something.”

They’re in a coffee shop near the Tate. PJ is still all curls and pastel knitwear, Dan hasn’t seen him for a while, they don’t tend to do the same jobs anymore. Not after that one. 

“Maybe I didn’t look for long enough,” PJ replies. “I don’t get why he wants that one in particular, is all. She had better stuff there.”

“She really didn’t. Everything was half finished and with a side of meh,” Dan is getting really attached to this Icelandic artist. “The llama is just randomly amazing.”

PJ studies him for a second. “Why this job? I thought you were quitting.”

“This is the last one.”

“You said that about a few of them.” PJ feels guilty, Dan knows, about what happened in Manchester. Everyone feels guilty about that. “Why this one in particular?”

Felix, as they were leaving the Tate, still Dan’s least favourite art gallery in existence, had pressed a small scrap of paper into his hand (in the pretence of a handshake) and said, “I meant what I said earlier. That’s what you’ve earnt. It’s enough for a house of your own, and then some. More than some.”

The house of your own comment had been a low blow, even Felix had known it. He knows precisely why Dan loves the Camden flat so much, knows why it’s where most of Dan’s (tiny collection of) belongings have ended up. 

Felix shook his head apologetically. “Or you know, whatever you want. Doesn’t have to be a house. Or anything. Fuck. Sorry.”

Dan had shrugged it off (even though he’d felt it right through to his heart) and said, “it’s fine.” He hadn’t even looked at the money on the paper.

“I just don’t think I’m cut out for it anymore,” he says. “Also, I keep making mistakes. Especially since, you know, _that_ one.”

PJ says, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.” Dan then completely contradicts himself. “Was he there when you were there?”

PJ takes a long while to answer and then says, “Yes.”

Dan has a billion questions (how did he look? Did you speak to him? Did he see you?) but says, “Okay. I thought Felix might have been lying, to make me take the job.”

“I don’t think he’d lie about that.”

Dan isn’t sure. “I don’t know, he might.”

“Seriously? Marzia would rat him out instantly,” PJ gives Dan a serious look, holds eye contact for longer than necessary. “He was there. I saw him. He looked fine.”

Dan feels some small amount of tension release itself, from where it’s been coiled up in his chest, and says, “Okay. That’s good.”

PJ waits, politely, for any further questions and (when there are none) says, “I mean, of all the things in the world to paint….a llama. In a meadow.”

PJ just doesn’t appreciate true art.

~*~

The first job with PJ had been to “retrieve” a Matisse from a private collector (which turned out to be a polite term for a competitor who’d stolen it before Felix could get to it). The Open Window - pinks, blues and greens. Window shutters thrown open onto the seaside. Little boats, flowers. “It’ll be a smash and grab,” said PJ, smoothly. “Not the usual, sophisticated way that I like to work, but time is of the essence.”

It had involved a lot of running. The collector lived in a ridiculous chalet in Austria that had lots of winding stairways and she (expecting their arrival) had hung twenty fake Matisses on every floor.

“Well, this is getting annoying,” PJ said, on fake Matisse number 30.

Dan attempted to agree, but was too busy trying not to hack up a lung from all the stupid running.

The real one was hidden in the darkest plainest corner of the whole place. It looked like it belonged there, like a genuine open window. Dan hesitated in front of it. “But it looks -”

“Let’s not get romantic about these things,” PJ unhooked it. “Gonna have to take it in the frame. You can carry it.”

“Oh, _thanks_ ,” Dan said, drily. “That’ll absolutely help with the running.”

They’d had to run all the way down the chalet’s driveway to the motorcycle and sidecar that Dan had procured for the occasion (it had been his “one job.” PJ had not been impressed. Dan has never been in charge of the getaway vehicles since). 

He obviously had to sit in the sidecar. And had Matisse inflicted bruises on his knees for weeks.

~*~

Dan requests Louise for surveillance, because he always does, but she says no, which she never does.

“I disapprove,” she says, as sternly as Louise is capable of being. “I don’t think you should be taking another job.”

“Is this because of the last one?”

“I’m talking more about the one before it.”

“Everyone seems to be wanting to talk about that at the moment,” Dan observes. Funny how no one had wanted to talk about it at the time, really. Apart from Louise.

Louise says, “Are you only taking it because he’s there? You can tell me.”

Dan says, “That’s a pretty big part of it” and then sighs. “It’s more wanting to check that he’s okay.”

“Dan, think about this logically. Think about what happened last time. And you’re going to show up to do the exact same thing again.”

“Not the exact same. You remember what happened.”

Louise is quiet for a second. “I do.”

“Tyler can do most of the out in the open stuff, he won’t even know I’m there. It’s just, I have to see him. Even if it’s only once.”

Louise says, “Remember that I disapproved of this” but she doesn’t sound that disapproving anymore.

~*~

Dan usually does the out in the open stuff; the sweet talking gift shop staff, the wide eyed questions to museum guides, the flirting with security guards (only once. But what a once that turned out to be), the pretending to be an innocent art student who has somehow wandered off from his tour group. The dimples come in handy a lot of the time.

“You just have one of those faces,” said Felix, more than once. 

He never elaborated but Marzia, bless her, always wanting to leave a positive, always added, “A nice face.”

His success mostly comes down to being completely unassuming and lethargic. Pretending to be a British post grad in Boston, when they were after that Renoir, the gallery owner had caught him walking out with the painting (fairly obviously) under his arm and had still told the police (in documents Felix had acquired) “James? No, he’s just a student. He used to come and sit on the benches all day. We always assumed he was napping. I can’t see that he’d have the energy for something like this.”

That was a recurring theme in a lot of their police documents. “Oh, Henri? The new boy who spoke terrible French even though he said he was from Calais? Can’t have been him - he mostly used to go to the staff room and use all of our dial-up.” “Evan? That American student who spoke in a weird half English accent? Oh no, definitely not him. He got lost in the galleries half the time.” 

Felix had thought it was the funniest thing ever and assumed it was all some elaborate scheme on Dan’s part until time went on and it became clear that it actually wasn’t.

~*~

“Out in the open?” says Tyler, aghast. “I’m terrible at that. _Look at me_.”

Dan does. Tyler’s hair is currently cotton candy blue, quiffed up like a 50’s film star. His hands wave around when he talks. His voice is bubbly and loud. He likes to wear bright clashing pastels. He has a point.

“I can’t do it.”

“Because of the security guard?” Tyler nods. Dan thinks, wow, Tyler, get straight to the point, but then Tyler always does. “But who else do we have?”

“PJ. And someone for surveillance, Louise, uh, can’t at the moment.”

Tyler looks confused, Dan and Louise are a team, always have been. He wisely chooses not to ask. “PJ then.”

“PJ….” Dan can’t think of any other way to word it and goes with the truth. “He knows PJ.”

Tyler says, “Is this is a good idea? It all sounds too close. Like stuff could get compromised.” Even as he’s saying it he looks more interested. Tyler loves the drama of it all. “And what are you going to do? If not what you usually do?”

There are four main components to a successful heist team. Sometimes five but this requires too much planning so Dan doesn’t usually get involved with that. One - props, backstories, papers etc - always PJ. Two - surveillance - usually Louise, now he needs to find someone else. Surveillance is a level of organisation that he’s just not up to. Then Three and Four - people on the ground, involved. One out in the open, the other behind the scenes, planning escape routes, getting plans. Usually Tyler.

“We’ll swap. I’ll do the escapist stuff.”

Tyler says, “ _Seriously_?” then, “sorry, that was rude. But, I mean, are you sure? The Tate is difficult. It’s right on the river. And you’re not really - Are you _sure_?”

Dan says, “he _can’t_ see me.”

“He never said anything last time,” says Tyler, thoughtfully. “But then, I guess he didn’t know your real name or anything so -”

He did at the end. When too much had happened. The point still stands though, he could have said something, but he didn’t. Dan has tried, over the past few months, not to ponder too much on what exactly that means.

Tyler appears to read all of this on his face and falls silent. He says, gently, “I’ll do it. I’ll dye my hair and everything. And I’ll help you with the other stuff. But still, river escapes _suck_.”

~*~

There was a time, a long stretch of time if he’s honest, where he really enjoyed it. Loved the travelling, and the excitement, and the cities, and the feeling he would get from actually carrying something off. Actually doing what he’d meant to and being successful at it. Actually having genuine real friends. The buzz of getting to hold something beautiful in his hands, if even for a short space of time.

It was the last one that started getting to him. What’s the point of having something, a masterpiece, everything you’ve ever wanted, so beautiful that it hurts to look at it sometimes, if it’s literally only in your hands for the minutes/hours that it takes to run to the car/train/motorcycle/sometimes plane if Felix was feeling flash? If it’s taken from your grasp as if it was never even there to begin with. 

He always wanted to ask Felix, what happens to them? The paintings? The answers are always vague - Felix asks for things he feels are unappreciated, things that are stuck in the darkest corners of galleries, the least famous works of great artists, “I look after them” he says, all the time. “They deserve to be looked at, properly.”

When Dan had first met Felix, and been completely overwhelmed by the sheer Felix-ness of him, Felix had said he was an “art rescuer.”

“Does art need rescuing?” Dan had replied, confused.

“Everything does,” Felix said.

~*~

Mark gets surveillance. Which, Dan likes Mark a lot - he’s an incredibly sweet guy, who’s good at what he does, but no one ever picks him for surveillance on account of his….

“ARE YOU SERIOUS?” says Mark.

… booming movie announcer voice. Felix has given up many jobs on account of Mark’s lack of inside voice (including one in Chicago where Mark had wandered up to American Gothic and said “I JUST DON’T SEE HOW WE’RE GOING TO STEAL THIS”) but refuses to cut him loose because he’s _such a nice guy_.

Which he is. Mark brings Dan a whole load of fancy American cereals because he remembers that he likes them and is late to their meeting because he helped two old ladies cross the street outside Starbucks. Dan knows because he watched (the second old lady totally groped Mark’s [impressive] bicep). 

“No one ever asks for me,” says Mark, delightedly. “I haven’t been requested for a job in months.”

Dan ends up smiling back at him. Mark would be amazing at the out in the open stuff, by sheer adorableness alone, if it wasn’t for THE VOICE. “Well, here you are. I asked for you specifically.”

“ _Really_?!”

Not really. Alfie had been busy. Caspar, his usual second choice after Louise, was in the Bahamas claiming to be scoping out a job but probably just on a really long holiday. He’d asked Louise again at least seven times.

“Really. I know we haven’t worked together much -”

“I know; I’ve wanted to. I meant to call you, after the whole…” Mark waves a hand in the air “... thing. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

“Hey, it’s fine. I probably wouldn’t have wanted to talk about it anyway.”

“It happened to me once. Girl who owned a little gallery in LA, had an original Jose Bernal, somehow. It would have been the easiest job ever.”

“And?”

“I couldn’t do it.”

“Well, that’s the difference.”

Mark gives him a sad look. “Don’t beat yourself up about it. What could you do?”

(Dan has a sudden flashback of him asking Phil this exact question, in the basement of a museum in Manchester, alarms going off, and Phil saying, shouting really, “the complete opposite of what you did! _That’s_ what you could have done!”)

Dan says, “Lots of things. What happened to the girl?”

He’s secretly hoping for Mark to say I married her! We co-own the little gallery! Baby on the way! But that’s never going to be the case.

Mark says, “I was too honest. Or thought that she’d react differently. But there we go.” He gives Dan a considering look, head on one side, it’s like being given a considering look by a labrador puppy. “And is Phil going to be there? On this job?”

It surprises Dan that Mark is the first one to say his name aloud. Everyone else has skirted around the issue, walking on eggshells, but Mark just tumbles right in and says it. “I’ve been told so. The exhibition came from Manchester and I guess he’s accompanying it.”

“I’m not sure if that’s really a great idea,” says Mark, doubtfully, sounding a lot like Louise. “Are you going to be okay with that?”

Dan says, “I’m always okay.”

Mark is too much of a nice guy to point out that all current evidence proves otherwise.

~*~

Dan isn’t sure if they make the perfect team or an incredibly odd one. PJ says the former, Tyler says the latter.

“Mark?” hisses Tyler. “I love him and his great arms but _really_? Why didn’t you just get Jack to do the prep and deafen us all?”

Jack is louder than Mark, if that’s possible. He also only works alone and has an amazing success rate that terrifies everyone. He probably wouldn’t answer Dan’s calls, but he doesn't really answer _anyone's_ calls.

They’re meeting, together for the first time, in Hyde Park. Mark has wandered off to play with a passing golden retriever (he’s taken off his hoodie to reveal a vest and is letting the dog clamber all over him. The retriever’s owner has actual heart eyes). 

Tyler has dyed his hair peroxide blond. As plain as he was prepared to go, apparently. He’s looking at the museum staff data that Mark has put together, with their role and working patterns, running down the list with his index finger - which keeps hesitating on one name. 

PJ says, “I think the easiest way is the the Mona Lisa thing again..….”

The “Mona Lisa thing” is disguising themselves as cleaners and then hiding in the museum after closing, usually in a storage room. It really only works in smaller places - like, for example, Manchester. 

Dan sighs out loud when he’d meant to only do it in his head.

“It turns out that the Tate has just posted a couple of job vacancies and you know my contacts can help with that, so -”

“Dan needs to be out of the way,” Mark chirps, returning from the retriever and the (disappointed looking) retriever owner. “What have you got?”

“I thought - ticket clerk and gift shop clerk? Dan in the gift shop, you won’t see many security guards in there.”

“ _Retail_?” says Dan, in disgust. He’s not good with retail; they never put him anywhere where he has to deal with customers. “Are you sure?”

“There’s no other option without making you visible to security,” PJ replies mildly. “And that’s too much of a risk. I scoped it out, the gift shop staff have their own staff area and everything, you’ll be separate but can still help Tyler out.” 

“Fine. Retail, customers, fine. You know how much I love people.”

PJ says, “well, yes, that’s evident. I’ll get it arranged.”

~*~

After the park outing Dan takes Mark to the exhibition, which even Mark says is a stupid risk. Secretly Dan almost wants to be seen or, more than anything, to _see_. Mark protests, weakly, the entire way through the ticket line and then into the gallery.

“What are you going to do?” Mark attempts to whisper. It doesn’t work. “Hide behind the sculptures?” 

“I don’t know.” Dan is sticking close to Mark, who is big enough and sturdy enough to block most of his, slimmer, frame from view. “Just tell me if you see him.”

“I don’t know what he looks like,” Mark points out. “And also, it’s late. There’s not going to be any crowds for you to hide in.” He turns to look at Dan and something on Dan’s face must be pathetic enough for him to sigh and say, “Describe him to me.”

They stop in front of Llama in Meadow, which Dan suddenly remembers is the point of this whole trip. Mark says, “Holy fuck”, causing surprised laughter from the other visitors. He drops his voice a fraction, “is that seriously it?”

“Look at it for longer. Trust me.”

After a few more seconds Mark says, “ _Oh_ ” in as small a voice as Dan has ever heard from him. “It’s kind of beautiful actually.”

“I know right?” Dan is keeping his voice casual but surveying the entire area. There are two security personnel, both looking bored, one girl, one guy. The guy is not Phil. 

Mark says, “is he here?” out of the corner of his mouth, which would usually flatten the volume somewhat but, no. 

“He’s isn’t.” Dan steps out from where he’d been bracketing himself behind Mark. “I don’t know if I’m relieved or not.”

“Don’t tell PJ that I let you come here.” Mark is still staring at the painting. “I’m going to go and buy a postcard of this.”

“Fine, I’ll wait outside. Buy me one too.”

Dan is crossing the main entrance area, heading for the exit, distracted by his own disappointment, guard down, when it happens. He has his head ducked, looking at the pamphlet for the exhibition, when the exit door nearly swings back into his head, and is then caught. 

Whoever was walking through in front of him says, “oops, sorry” in such a familiar voice that Dan snaps his head up. 

It’s Phil. Of course it is. He looks the same, exactly as Dan left him, like he’s been preserved in a jar this whole time, frozen, waiting for Dan to come back. His mouth is half open in shock, his eyebrows raised nearly into his fringe. His hair is the same. His eyes are the same. 

It’s pretty much the same facial expression Dan left him with too. Without the look of complete and utter betrayal. No, wait, there it is. It’s as if someone has pressed play on a paused scene, in a basement, in Manchester, where one of them has just said _I love you, you don’t understand_. 

(no, not one of them. Dan. Dan had said that. He thinks it now, so loudly that Phil can probably hear it)

They stand and stare at each other. Dan has no idea what his face is doing. Phil’s face is doing a million different things all at once. 

Dan says “I -”

Phil says, “No, not here.” His voice is not the same. It sounds like he’s deliberately trying to make it flat, take all of the emotion and the Phil-ness out of it. 

Dan thinks, hopes, he means _no, we can’t talk here, let’s go somewhere else, you can explain everything, I forgive you_ , but then Phil says, “You can’t seriously be doing it here too. Again.” 

Oh. “You’re still -”

“What? In my job? Thanks for the observation.”

Dan says, “Let me explain.”

Phil lets the door close in his face.

Gently though, because this is Phil, who can’t lash out properly even when he’s angry. The glass bumps Dan’s nose. 

Someone clasps a hand on his shoulder so hard that it nearly knocks him off his feet. 

Mark says, “So that was him, huh?”

“Yes,” says Dan, slightly muffled.

“PJ is going to be _pissed_.”

“We won’t tell him.”

Mark pulls Dan away from the door, spins him so they’re facing each other but fixes his eyes over Dan’s shoulder. “He’s not outside.”

“Of course he’s not. He doesn’t want to see me. He’s probably run a mile in the other direction.”

“But you wanted to see him” - it’s not a question.

“Yes?” - and yet Dan answers like it is.

“Which is why we came here. Which was a bad idea,” Mark says, but nicely. “A really bad one. We need to go. Just in case.”

He means just in case Phil has gone to get reinforcements but Dan knows that this won’t happen; Phil wouldn’t and hadn’t. He says this to Mark in the taxi, about twenty minutes too late for the conversation, but Mark understands what he means anyway.

~*~

Mark comes to stay at the Camden flat because he hates hotels. He spends a long time standing in front of the Monet, a hand outstretched like he wants to touch it but is scared to. Dan remembers that Mark is always drawn to the floral paintings, for some reason, the calming, brightening ones.

“The girl in LA - did she call the police on you?” he says, lightly, trying to be casual, getting new bedding out of one of the cupboards (the bedding is Hugo Boss. Of course it is.)

Mark says, “Yes, she did”, withdrawing his hand from the Monet. 

“I’m sorry.”

Mark nearly says something else, doesn’t, and walks over to collect the pile of stupidly expensive bedding from Dan’s arms. “But he didn’t.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Either time.”

Dan repeats, “Either time.”

“That means something. At least” Mark breaks out a smile, the one that makes his eyes crinkle. “This day ended up being far more stressful than I’d expected.”

“I’m sorry.”

Mark shrugs. “It’s done. It was going to happen anyway, I think you knew that.”

“Don’t put it in the log.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Mark gives him a long, considering, look. “Are you going to see him again?”

Yes. No. Of course. How can I not? In Manchester he and Phil could be in rooms full of people, streets full of people, cities full, and still manage to collide with each other, somehow, and every time Phil would look at him like oh _there_ you are, like Dan was the only thing he’d ever been searching for. Dan doesn’t suppose that he’ll see that expression from him again soon.

Mark says, “That’s what I thought” even though Dan hadn’t said anything aloud.

~*~

Mark’s log says “day one of llama job. Uneventful. Meeting at Hyde Park to discuss strategy. Peej to arrange. Visited exhibition ALONE. Completely without incident and saw no one because I was completely by myself and alone, as stated.”

“Expect job to take number of weeks. Tate difficult location. Exhibit is difficult and llama in full view. Once T can cover angles can decide.”

“Very important that D stays in gift shop.”

“Llama is somehow the best and most awful landscape painting I have ever seen. Have put postcard on fridge. D and I lost ten minutes this morning staring at it.”

It was actually more like thirty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- thanks to the two art students I live with who were both helpful and confused by my sudden interest in famous paintings and their locations. 
> 
> \- sorry to The Tate. You're a perfectly nice museum, I swear!
> 
> \- Monet's Wisteria is [here](http://www.wikiart.org/en/claude-monet/wisteria-1920?utm_source=returned&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=referral/).
> 
> \- Degas' A Cotton Office in New Orleans is [here and thankfully unharmed irl.](http://www.wikiart.org/en/edgar-degas/the-cotton-exchange-new-orleans-1873?utm_source=returned&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=referral/)
> 
> \- And Matisse's Open Window is [here](http://totallyhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/The-Open-Window-by-Henri-Matisse.jpg/).
> 
> \- Llama in Meadow is, sadly, still unpainted.


	2. Chapter 2

Dan first saw Phil, in a tiny museum in Manchester, kneeling in front of the painting that he was there to steal, the blue of the waves illuminating the blue of his eyes, smiling patiently at a weeping eight-year-old who had been left behind by the rest of her primary school trip. He said something that made her laugh (probably something ridiculous, knowing Phil) and when he walked her off to try and find wherever the group had gone he kept slightly hunched, as though not wanting to scare her by being too tall.

Dan had thought oh my god I want to know everything about you.

And Phil had told him. It’s just that Dan didn’t repay the favour until it was too late.

~*~

“Day eight of llama job. Have spent numerous days in Tate; location of painting still a concern. Jobs begin on day eleven (approx). D still resistant to retail but Peej has recommended to ‘stop whining’. Exhibition has security guards x2 at all times, any combination of guards 1-6 (see list)”.

“Security guards 2 and 5 are best combination. Think they are secretly dating. Seem distracted 98% of the time.”

“Security guard 4 to be avoided. Takes things v.seriously.”

“Security guard 3 to be avoided for v.different reasons.”

~*~

PJ says, “It’s going to be more difficult than I thought. That stupid painting is inexplicably popular. There’s always people around it.”

Mark says, “You’re not looking at it _properly_.”

“Not you too.”

They’re having breakfast (brunch really, Dan hasn’t been up early enough for breakfast since 2007) in the market. It’s sunny, Dan’s even wearing shorts, drinking a smoothie, they could be four friends having a completely innocent meal before going for a jog, or to the pub, or whatever normal people do instead of planning art heists.

“It’s everywhere. I’ve seen people with it on bags, t-shirts,” PJ shakes his head. “That fucking llama.”

“Llamas are adorable,” Tyler supplies. He still hasn’t seen it, prefers the element of surprise. “And there must be a time of day when there aren’t so many people around.”

Mark says, “I don’t know. We were there quite late and it was still pretty busy.”

There’s a pause. Mark appears to realise what he’s said and freezes, french toast halfway to his mouth. PJ, delicately, says, “We?”

“We? I meant me. Just me. On my own. Whatever.”

PJ narrows his eyes at Mark. Mark widens his in return. PJ sighs.

Tyler says, “I can’t decide on my fake name.”

Dan usually goes for generic, forgettable, names. He’s been Evan a few times. Dylan more than once. Zac. Liam. He doesn’t really take the whole fake persona thing very seriously. 

Tyler does. “I think I’m going to be like an academic type. Working in the gallery to fulfil my dream of being around all the beautiful art. Moody and aloof. Maybe I’m a sculptor in my spare time, endlessly making figurines that look like my lost boyfriend. Like a _Blaine_ ,” he sweeps a dramatic hand through the air. 

“You can’t be a Blaine.”

“Or a _Zayn_.”

“Or that either,” PJ looks completely done with all of them. “It’s gotta be forgettable. Everyone remembers a Blaine.”

Tyler hesitates before saying, “ _Sebastian_ ”

“C’mon, Tyler. I have to email them your ‘details’ today.”

“ _Ashton_. I can be a preppy type. In a band on the side. Hidden angst. Working in the gallery because I want to impress -”

“Fine, Ashton’s fine. Dan?”

Dan shrugs. “Liam again, I guess.” 

Liam has always been pretty successful in the past. He doesn’t intend on ever using Dylan again. Dylan had a whole other life going on; he exists only in Dan’s head, or hopefully in some parallel universe where he’s married to a cute museum security guard and never stole anything.

~*~

Mark spends a lot of time on Skype: hushed conversations that Dan can never quite catch, which is amazing because he didn’t know Mark was capable of being hushed. There’s just so _much_ of Mark, he’s noisy without meaning to be, continually banging into things and knocking things over like every room is slightly too small for him. Or too quiet.

Dan goes out onto the balcony when the Skype convos are happening, trying to prove to Mark that he is 100% Not Listening. The balcony is crammed with Marzia’s flower-boxes, hanging baskets of begonias above, the smell is like having seventeen perfumes sprayed in your face at one time. 

He checks his messages, on all his phones. The burner phone. His actual phone. The Felix phone. And the Manchester phone. 

He doesn’t usually keep phones after jobs. They usually get thrown into rivers, off trains, that sort of thing. It had been a risk to keep the Manchester one. But he likes knowing that Phil has the number if he ever, you know, decides…. 

There are never any messages on that phone. 

Mark wanders out, having plastered on a fake smile. “Hi.”

“Hey,” Dan says. “Everything okay?”

“Of course it is.”

“Good,” Dan gathers together all his phones. “I was just checking my messages. PJ’s sent all the stuff for me to start. Or for Liam to start.”

“What’s Liam’s backstory?”

“I don’t really get into all that,” which is lazy. And makes it easy for him to get caught out. He never fully commits to the accents or forgets where his new birthplace is meant to be. “I can never keep up”

“We should write one. It makes it easier.”

“I’m thinking he dropped out of uni and started working in the gift shop because his friend said it would be something cool to do except now it’s been a few years and he’s not really sure if he likes the gift shop anymore, and he really just wants to settle down and have a nice normal life with someone.”

Mark says, obviously, “That’s _your_ backstory Dan”

“I suppose it is.”

Mark gives him a pained, your sadness is making me sad, expression, and reaches up to pick a red begonia. He holds it out to Dan like he’s asking him to prom.

Dan takes the flower and puts it behind his ear. “Sorry, I’m dragging down the mood.”

“The mood wasn’t very high to begin with,” says Mark, and continues plucking begonias. Before long Dan has an entire flower crown.

~*~

Liam and Ashton start at the gallery on day twelve, slightly behind schedule. Ashton charms everyone, flirts with everyone who comes to his booth, and gets tips even though you’re not really supposed to tip your ticket clerk.

Liam spends the whole day arranging the same tower of books, ignores a shoplifter and breaks the till.

~*~

Phil first saw Dan, in a tiny museum in Manchester, wearing a nametag that said Dylan, cleaning one tiny patch of floor over and over, fringe falling in his eyes, staring at The Sea at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer like it was the best thing he had ever seen, like he was looking at something behind it, something hidden. Phil had said “hey, that’s my favourite too. Everyone always walks straight past it” and Dan had jumped like a startled cat and then instantly scurried off.

Phil had thought no wait stay.

And Dan hadn’t, obviously. Even though Phil had said it multiple times (in bed, when one of them was late for work, when Dan snuck over during his break and then had to go back, when Dan had to disappear for one of his numerous ‘meetings’, Phil had said it over and over, in a million different ways, _no, wait, stay_ ).

The last time he’d said it had been the worst.

~*~

Tyler says, “I actually like it. I could be a ticket clerk forever.”

They’re eating lunch on the steps outside the Tate, as hidden from view as possible because, reasons. Dan’s eating sandwiches that Mark had made him (they’re huge. Dan thinks he used an entire chicken).

Dan says, “ _Seriously_? Isn’t it boring?” 

Tyler shrugs. “That’s what I like about it. It’s so easy. And everyone’s so nice. I’m definitely going to be able to build up to swapping for some late shifts soon. Also, everyone calls me Ash. I like it.”

“But it’s not your name.”

Tyler gives him an odd look. “I know.”

“I just -”

“How’s it going with you?”

“It’s everything I thought it would be.” 

“Seen, uh, any security guards around?”

“Nope.” They don’t come anywhere near the gift shop. PJ had been right about that. It’s a source of much angst as Tina, the main shop clerk, is a bit in love with Finn, head security guard and overall Abercrombie & Fitch type, and they all have to spend a lot of time gazing from the shop entrance over the hall to the main gallery to tell her if he’s there or not. 

“So you haven’t seen him?”

Dan says, “No,” slightly too quickly. He has seen Phil twice since the terrible mistake of a few nights back. Phil hadn’t seen him. They were all fleeting glances, around corners, the flash of a sleeve, but he would recognise Phil anywhere, from any angle, in seconds.

“ _Right_ ,” says Tyler, obvious disbelief.

~*~

“Day fourteen of llama job. Will need to reduce trips to the Tate as have now been to view painting a number of times. Bugs placed in gift shop when visiting D, will test later. D wants it noted that he is not enjoying retail. Feel this is an understatement”.

“Security guards 2 and 5 remain best combination. Appear to have argued today. Was able to place bug on painting frame with no observation.”

~*~

Dan is about to play the Steinway, or has lifted the cover at least, when the Manchester phone rings.

The display shows Phil Lester Calling. Dan knocks over several coffee cups and one statuette (hopefully not too pricey) in his effort to get to it. When he says “hello?” he hardly recognises his voice.

There’s a long silence.

Dan says, “Phil?”

“You’re still using this phone?” Phil says, surprised, and in his surprise seems to forget that he’s angry. He sounds like he always did. 

“I kept it.” 

“Oh.”

Another silence. 

Dan says, “Look, I -”

Phil exhales, a long puff of air that causes static on the line. “Don’t. I don’t even know why I phoned.”

“I’m glad you did though.”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Phil repeats. “You’re stealing something, aren’t you? Planning to?”

“You have to let me explain.”

“Explain what? I think it was all perfectly clear.”

“It wasn’t. I didn’t get to - I had things to tell you. I should have told you properly.”

Phil exhales again, another short burst, and repeats, “I don’t know why I phoned.”

“I’m glad you did, Phil, I’m really am, I’ve been wanting to -”

Phil hangs up.

Dan keeps the phone pressed to his ear for a full five minutes.

~*~

The second time Dan saw Phil they were both back in front of The Sea at Saintes-Maries, which had no business being in a tiny Manchester museum, where no one ever came to see it, and Dan had thought, had known, that Phil would be the reason why this job would fail.

“You really like this painting,” Phil observed. “Or this one patch of floor that you keep cleaning.”

Dan had smiled, a genuine one, not the usual dimple filled one that he uses when he wants something. “It’s the floor. I can’t get enough.”

“You’re in the right job then at least.”

Dan startled, confused, and then remembered oh wait, I’m a _cleaner_. “Oh right, yeah. That’s lucky.” He cleaned the patch of floor again, for good measure, anything to avoid looking at Phil really. 

“It’s my favourite too. The painting, that is,” Phil said. “I don’t even know why it’s here. We never get work like this.”

“It’s beautiful,” Dan agreed. “I like how lonely the boats look.”

“Oh. I mostly just like all the blue,” Phil said. 

Dan had actually looked at him then, up from under his fringe, into the blue-yellow of Phil’s eyes, and said, “well, that’s fine too. I like blue.”

Phil flushed. “You’re new here right? I saw you, the other day, but -”

“Yeah, I’m -” Dan had never wanted to say his own name so badly. “I’m Dylan.”

Lie Number One, as it turned out.

~*~

“He’s not there,” Dan tells Tina.

“Are you _sure_?” Tina is kneeling behind the till, foundation compact in hand. “You’re not looking very hard.”

Dan makes an exaggerated fuss of cupping his hand over his eyes, staring out over the horizon of the entrance hall, to where Finn should be. 

“Very funny.”

“Maybe he’s not in today.”

“He should be. I memorised his…..” Tina’s voice trails off. “I mean, he should be there. Go out and look.”

“I can’t.”

“You can. You are allowed to leave the shop you know.” Tina squints into her mirror. “Even though you never _do_. Think of the people you’ll meet in the outside world.”

Zoe, the other gift shop girl, who has great hair and even better makeup, says, “Hey - like that other security guard. The one who was asking about him.”

“Oh _yeah_ ,” says Tina. “The cute one with the -” she swoops her hand forward into a fringe. “Hair like yours actually Liam. But much darker.”

Dan says, “Yeah, he dyes it” because he’s distracted and isn’t concentrating because, Phil. Tina and Zoe both give him surprised looks. “I mean, I know which one you mean. Why was he -”

“He came in when you were on lunch. Asking if we had a new starter. He knocked half the bookmark display over,” Zoe says, gently. “Then Tina scared him off. Think he likes you though.”

Dan resists the urge to put his head in his hands. Or to say _he did once. He liked me a lot once_. 

Across the hall Finn strides into view and arranges himself at his post like he’s posing for a photo shoot, leaning casually against the wall, concerned furrow between his eyebrows. Tina makes a strangled little sound. 

Zoe, next to Dan, hand on his shoulder, says, “It seemed like he knew you.”

“Who?” says Dan, tone as casual as he can make it.

“The security guard,” she swoops a fringe too. “Definitely acted like you knew each other.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so.”

Zoe hums a “hhhmmmm” noise and, thankfully, leaves him be.

~*~

“I’m Phil. I tried to talk to you before but -”

“Oh yeah, sorry, I was late for my….” Dan shrugged, break? End of shift? Who knows? 

Phil didn’t seem too bothered. “Why do you think the boats look lonely? I thought it was a happy painting” he frowned at the three little boats in the middle of The Sea at Saintes-Maries. “Like they’re just doing what they’re meant to be.”

“Look at how small they are compared to everything else. Don’t you find that lonely?” Dan had no idea how this conversation had started, everything in his mind was telling him to leave, no matter how rude that would come across. “They just look so insignificant. To me.”

Phil said, “The painting’s giving you an existential crisis” but gently, almost fondly, like he already knew Dan and all his ridiculousness. 

Dan said “Lots of things do.”

“Not just paintings of boats?”

“Not just paintings of boats.” 

Phil gave him a long considering look. “That sounds exhausting.”

“Can be.” Dan gave him a long considering look back, as bad an idea as that was. Phil looked the type of person who was good at talking people out of existential crises, if it was possible to even look like that was one of your skills. One side of his shirt collar was sticking out of his security guard sweater, Dan had a sudden urge to reach out and tidy it up. 

He said, “I should -” at the same time as Phil said “Hey, I -”, but carried on talking anyway. “I should go. People to see, floors to clean.” He did finger guns too, he remembers. So awkward.

Phil, amazingly, did finger guns back (just as awkward) and said, “Okay, see you around. I’ll be here. At the painting.”

“Why? You like it _that_ much?”

“No, well, I _do_ , but I’m pretty much it's personal security.” Phil gave the painting a fond look. “We don’t get much of that standard, like I said, so I have to look after it.”

Dan thought oh _fuck_ no and said, in a slightly strangled tone, “What just you?”

“Yep. I’m fully responsible. Which is ridiculous because I can’t keep houseplants alive. There’s a pool on how long before it gets nicked,” Phil rolled his eyes at Dan, in a how ridiculous right? way.

Dan said nothing. He couldn’t really hear over the never-ending chorus of _no,no,no_ currently going on in his head.

~*~

“Day eighteen of llama job. Painting extremely popular, as expected, even if slight disapprovement from Peej. Frequently surrounded by crowds, much discussion of how cute llamas are. Lots of return visitors who stand in front of painting as though transfixed. Think a night-time job may be best/only option”

“Security guards 2 and 5 definitely dating. Are now no longer paired together”

“Engaged security guard 4 in conversation about gym and weights. Seemed preoccupied and staring at gift shop. Speak to D”

“Security guard 3 [rest of sentence crossed out and ineligible]”

~*~

“These girls in the gift shop talk about some guy called Finn a lot,” says Mark, headphones on, navigating between three laptops. “And you, sometimes.”

Dan, sat at the Steinway, having progressed to hovering his hands over the keys, says, “Really? Saying what?”

“How hot he is, how good he looks in his uniform, how great his hair is, if he’s single, why he -”

“I meant about me.”

“The same, obviously,” Mark gives Dan’s stance a curious look. “Do you play?”

“Not for a while,” Dan folds his arms. “Don’t change the subject.”

“One of them said you should smile more because your dimples are adorable.” Mark takes off the headphones and holds them out to Dan. “There’s also a bit where a security guard comes in to ask about you, if you want to listen.”

Dan gives the headphones a longing glance. “No, it’s okay.”

“You already knew.”

“They mentioned it.”

“I won’t tell PJ. That he knows you’re there. I’ll delete it from the recording.”

Dan says, “Thanks Mark” as sincerely as he can. He doesn’t know why Mark has taken so strongly to protecting him with regards to Phil. He thinks it may have something to do with the whispered Skypes. A tiny gallery in LA. A girl. “Also Finn is security guard 4.”

“I thought so. He did have great hair.” 

Dan taps the G key of the Steinway with his finger, once, twice. “How long are we expecting this job to take?”

“Longer than we thought. PJ isn’t happy with the crowds. Neither am I. Hopefully it’ll quiet down once the exhibit’s been on a while. People just keep coming back though.”

Dan knows they can relate. He’d got up for cereal at 2am and met Mark in the kitchen, pondering the llama postcard on their fridge. “I’m just - Ready for it to be over, I think.”

Mark gives him a disbelieving look. “Really? I mean, once this is over, it’s _over_.”

“You’re not just talking about the job.” 

“Not completely,” Mark gives him a half smile and puts the headphones back on.

~*~

It’s a Wednesday, late afternoon, quiet in the shop. Tina and Zoe have gone for a late lunch/Finn mission (Finn missions, as far as Dan can tell, involve standing a safe distance from Finn and giggling a lot). He’s arranging the books so they’re perfectly symmetrical in the window display when Phil says, “Liam this time.”

Dan says, “What?” and spins around, taking out half the books with his flailing arm. 

Phil gives his name badge a pointed look. 

Dan has no idea what to say. His mouth is still half open, he knows, his fringe pushed back off his face. He runs a (shaking) hand through his hair, attempting to tidy it up. He says, “ _Phil_.”

Phil says, “Dan” which is the first time he’s ever said Dan’s name. It’s not exactly the tone that Dan would have wanted but - “I always thought you were lying. Maybe. I hoped you were. It was too ridiculous to be real but -”

Dan says, “I can explain. Let me explain.”

“You keep saying that,” Phil’s eyes are still fixed on the name badge, determinedly anywhere except Dan’s face. “I think I worked it out pretty well for myself in the end.”

“I didn’t want to do it. I tried to get out of it, you have to -”

Phil’s eyes finally snap to his. Blue, so much blue. “Is someone making you -”

“No, that’s not - I said it wrong. I tried - a lot of stuff got messed up. I didn’t want to but I couldn’t -” Phil has walked extremely close to him, Dan realises. Or he’s walked close to Phil. “I’m sorry.”

“What for, exactly?”

“Everything.”

“Well, that’s a lot of things to be sorry for,” Phil sighs. “You’re here for something too, aren’t you?”

Dan says nothing. 

“I’ll take that as a yes.” 

One side of Phil’s shirt collar is sticking out of his sweater. Dan reaches out, tidies it up, leaves his hand there, thumb touching Phil’s collarbone. Phil freezes under his touch, almost seems to stop breathing for a second, leans slightly forward and then flinches away. 

Dan says, “Phil” again. 

Phil says, quickly, as though determined to get all the words out, “I didn’t tell anyone. Before. They asked me but I didn’t say anything. I lied. I thought you were coming back. I thought it was a test and I failed it.”

Dan says, “Phil” for a third time (the answer to a question, the title of a song, the first line of a poem). “I wanted to come back, but -”

“I’m not doing that this time. Lying, I mean.”

The abrupt change in tone almost makes Dan jump. “I -”

“Please don’t -”

Tina says, “whoops sorry!” and her voice is obnoxiously loud. Dan hadn’t realised how quietly he and Phil had been speaking, hunched over by the window display, until the real world came clattering in, carrying half the stock of Pret A Manger and in fairly impractical work shoes.

Phil sprung back and mumbled something Dan couldn’t hear before sprinting out of the shop (not before taking out a map display).

“I didn’t interrupt anything, did I?” says Tina, staring at the scattered collection of maps. 

“No, nothing. He was asking about…” Dan waves a hand over the entire window display “....books.”

Dan texts Mark _i need you to delete another convo from the shop feed you’ll know what please don’t ask me about it._

~*~

The third time Dan saw Phil it was outside, in the rain, and neither of them were wearing coats. Phil’s fringe was flattened to his head and he’d cupped both hands around his mouth to shout, “hi Dylan” like he was yelling for Dan across entire oceans.

Dan had looked at him, rain dripping off his eyelashes, and thought how unfair this whole thing was, how in another life, if he was another Dan, a law student Dan, maybe a law student Dan who had completely innocently walked into an art gallery and met a security guard Phil, he could yell back, he could walk over and take Phil’s hand, he could say where the hell is your coat you’re going to catch a cold, and there would be no painting stealing whatsoever. 

Phil said, “Hi, I didn’t think you heard me.”

“Oh, sorry. In a world of my own.”

Phil gave him a fond look, remarkably similar to the look he’d given The Sea at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, and said, “Where’s your coat? You’re going to catch a cold.”

Dan stared at him, raindrops catching on his eyelashes, and said, “ _You’re_ not wearing a coat”, instead of saying what he actually wanted to say. 

Phil looked down, appeared to be surprised by his lack of coat and said, “Oh! I’m not.”

“You’re going to catch a cold,” Dan echoed. 

“Can’t have that. Who’ll look after the painting then?” Phil replied, cheerfully, and Dan physically flinched (but said it was the cold). 

They’d gone to Starbucks, to warm up, and Phil had chattered the entire way and Dan had kept thinking please don’t mention the painting again please just let me pretend that this is completely innocent and normal just for an evening and then I’ll never speak to you again.

Phil had jumped in a puddle, a tiny one, and the most gentle tap of a jump ever, yet it had still splashed Dan’s jeans. He had peeled his soaking wet fringe out of his eyes and given Dan that look again, the Saintes Maries de la Mer look, like Dan was the only thing worth looking at in the entire universe. 

Dan had jumped in a puddle then too, except it wasn’t tiny and his jump was more like a stamp. It soaked Phil up to his waist.

Phil laughed and Dan said, “I don’t want to not speak to you again.”

“That’s a weird thing to say,” but Phil looked happy with it anyway.

“I didn’t mean to say it out loud. Happens sometimes.” Dan shrugged it off and jumped in another puddle.

“You’re a very odd person.”

“So are you.”

Phil’s fringe had fallen back in his eyes, he flicked it out. “I like it though.”

“So do I.”

He’d actually wanted to say I don’t want to not speak to you again. I want to talk to you all the time. I want to know everything about you, everything that you like and dislike, I want to stand here in the rain with you even if I am probably going to catch pneumonia, I probably wouldn’t even care.

He’d wanted to say I don’t want to steal your painting.

He should have said “I’m Dylan” and left it at that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- the Sea at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer can be viewed [here](http://www.vangoghreproductions.com/paintings/1888-19-1.jpg/)
> 
> \- this is turning out to be a slower build than I expected, whoops.


	3. Chapter 3

Dan listens to the conversation again before it gets deleted. He actually just wants to hear Phil say his name for the first time (he replays it more than once, the hitch in Phil’s voice).

Phil, on the recording, says, again, _I didn’t tell anyone. Before. They asked me but I didn’t say anything. I lied. I thought you were coming back. I thought it was a test and I failed it_.

Dan replays _I thought you were coming back_.

Why hadn’t he responded to that? The moment’s gone now, opportunity lost, slipped through his fingers. Phil will never say it again. If he ever does Dan promises himself that he’ll respond, say the truth for once. 

Mark, returning to the flat (he’d gone for a jog to leave Dan alone with the laptop), says, “I have to delete it, you know that. PJ will gp crazy if he hears it.”

Dan says, “It’s fine. I’ve listened to it enough.”

He hadn’t. A million times wouldn’t be enough. He almost wants Mark to save it to a file, Phil saying _Dan_ , something that he can keep just for himself, Mark would do it too, he knows. It just doesn’t seem right.

Mark says, “PJ’s going to start noticing though, that stuff is missing. If there’s any more. I can get away with one or two but -”

“There’s not going to be any more.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“I hope not.”

Mark looks startled by the sudden honesty of the answer and says, “You want to talk about it?” - Mark is big on talking about things, always completely open and genuine. He’s really in the wrong line of work.

Dan had never talked about it with anyone, properly. Louise a little bit, but even then not the full details. And PJ, of course, but that hadn’t been the most constructive of conversations. 

Dan says, “I was going to go back. I was. He doesn’t know that.”

Mark is polite enough not to look utterly confused. “But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t. Not entirely.”

“What does that mean?”

Dan sighs. “I’m making this job angsty, I’m sorry. I’ll stop being so…..me about it.”

Mark says, “Hey, you should never stop being you” then makes a face. "That was corny as fuck, sorry. But still.”

Dan thinks honestly that the main appeal, in the beginning, was the being able to stop being himself. To push all of the insecurities and crises and anxieties to one side and exist somewhere outside of The Real World, in this ridiculous inbetween place where he acquires artwork for a Swedish dealer who dresses like he’s in a k-pop band and gives him envelopes of money for very little actual work. 

An echo of Phil, beside a painting, smiling and saying, “Found you at last. You’re a difficult person to try and catch up with.”

Another Phil, in pyjamas, in the kitchen of his little flat that Dan loved more than any flat in any city, “Where are you rushing off to now?”

Phil in red plaid, flushed in the face because he hated arguments, “I can never catch up with you. It’s like you’re never here, not properly.”

Phil across a crowded room, a busy gallery floor, a train station, a bar, a street full of people, face lighting up like Dan was the one thing he wanted to see, like he’d been waiting months/years/lifetimes for him “There you are.”

~*~

“This job is taking longer than it should,” says PJ. “I’m starting to get stressed out.”

Tyler says, “Chill. We’re getting there.”

“The exhibit closes in three weeks! We’ve done nothing, besides make a really detailed log and listen to some dull gift shop conversations.”

Dan says, “Hey” but with no real energy behind it. 

“We don’t have a plan,” PJ is wearing a dusty pink cardigan. His curls are practically ringlets. He’s trying to look intimidating and failing. “We haven’t even thought about a plan. I mean, Dan, have you even started thinking about escapes?”

There’s a pause. Dan says “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

PJ throws his hands in the air and gives some non-existent cameraman a can-you-believe-these-guys look. “There’s no time!”

Tyler says, “It has to be the river. When we did the Cleve Gray it was the river. There’s no other possible way out.”

(the Cleve Gray had been Whisper. Grey, dark purple and black. Dan hadn’t been on the job but he’d seen it later, in Felix’s Hamburg apartment. Felix said, “I’m going to rename it The Dan, it’s the most you painting I’ve ever seen” and tried to give it to Dan as a present because “I don’t want it anymore”. Dan had declined but only because he had no apartment of his own to hang it in. Where is that painting now? Somewhere with everything else Felix has rescued, probably) 

“So, what, we hire a boat?” says Mark, confused. “How do we get it _to_ the boat exactly?”

Everyone looks at Tyler, expectantly.

Tyler says, “With great difficulty. The Cleve Gray was the _worst_. I can’t believe I even agreed to come back here.”

PJ says, “Tyler -”

“We hire a boat. More than one boat. Decoy boats. All the boats.”

Mark says, “We _all_ get a boat?” looking increasingly like he regrets taking this job. “That’s risky though, right?”

“It is. But if we pull it off it works like a dream,” Tyler pulls out a pen and draws the four of them on his Starbucks napkin. Mark has huge biceps. Dan’s fringe covers half his face. “Say _I_ take the painting, with Dan, we come to the bank, you guys are there. Four boats. One each. Each boat has a decoy painting, all wrapped up. We swap, Mark, or whoever, ends up with the painting. Each boat goes in a different direction, each with a painting, it’s just only one of us actually has it, but impossible to tell. We all go our separate ways, llama is delivered to Felix, we get paid.” Tyler does jazz hands, “ta-da!”

“I can’t drive a boat,” says Dan. “I can barely drive a car. I’m not allowed to do the getaways, you all know that.”

“We practice,” PJ replies. “It’s risky but I think Tyler’s way is the only way. We can only use the river, any other direction takes you right onto the Southbank and that’s a no. I’ll arrange it.”

“Arrange what?” says Dan. “The _boating_?”

“I’m not really into the boats,” Mark pipes up. “Please give the actual painting to someone who’s driven a boat before.”

They all look at Tyler, again.

Tyler says, “ _seriously_.”

“We have three weeks,” says PJ “and I really don’t want to leave this until the closing night.”

Closing nights mean parties. PJ and Dan had done a job for a Jackson Pollock at a closing party once. Greyed Rainbow, probably Dan’s favourite painting of all time. He’d delayed the job by stopping to stare at it, to take in the sadness of it (PJ had said _really? You couldn’t take in the sadness of it when we were in the car?_ ), and they’d had to do a dash through the kitchens. Dan had run right through a champagne fountain and couldn’t get the smell of Moet out of his hair for weeks.

“It’s taking too long,” PJ repeats. “It’s like you guys don’t even want it to be over - are you enjoying it that much?”

Tyler looks shifty. He’s still loving being a ticket clerk, has been on all the staff nights out, walks into work with a huge smile on his face. “No, I still hate the Tate”

“Lies” says Dan. 

“Maybe it’s growing on me, I don’t know.”

“He was ticket clerk of the week last week,” Dan tells Mark.

“Aw, that’s great man, good job!” Mark says, completely sincerely. 

PJ says, “Are you guys being serious? Like, actually? Is this a real thing that’s happening?”

Tyler says, proudly, “It was two weeks in a row. They said it’s the first time that’s ever happened.”

Mark says, “That’s awesome, Tyler!”

“Great Tyler, you can stay there once you’ve stolen their one off llama painting, I’m sure that’ll be fine.” PJ is looking increasingly done with life.

“You think they’d let me?” Tyler exclaims.

PJ slams down the last of his caramel macchiato and stands up. “You guys are just…. I’ll text you about the boating. Don’t blow your cover in the meantime,” he mutters something under his breath and then storms out. Or tries to, it’s difficult with ringlets.

~*~

Phil, beside the painting, smiled so that his eyes crinkled and said, “Found you at last. You’re a difficult person to try and catch up with. I was starting to think you were avoiding me” (said lightly but with obvious hidden meaning).

Dan had been avoiding him. “Sorry, it’s been busy. You know, with the cleaning and all.”

Phil said, “Oh, okay” but frowned, for the first time that Dan had seen. He looked at a loss on what to say next, toed the floor with his (scuffed) work shoes. His uniform never seemed to fit him properly, never looked comfortable, collar always sticking out. Dan wanted to know what he wore when he wasn’t in work, where he went, who he went there with, why oh why he had to be the security guard in charge of this stupid Van Gogh painting. “It has been pretty busy I guess.”

It hadn’t. No one ever came. Which made why he was dragging this job out so long even more pathetic. Phil was just being kind. “It hasn’t,” Dan said. “There’s literally no one here. I don’t know why I said that. I’m mostly pretending to mop and going on tumblr.”

“The real story comes out,” Phil looked amused. “That’s mostly what I’m doing too, without the mopping. If this gets stolen it’s completely my fault.”

“It wouldn’t be your fault,” said with more passion then he’d meant to.

“That sounds ominous. Do you know something I don’t?” 

“No, I’m just saying, that you know, if…..” 

Phil said, “you know how I said that you’re an odd person…” but gently, not in a teasing way, more like a statement of fact.

“You also said that you liked it.”

“I did say that.”

“You meant it.”

“I meant it,” Phil flushed slightly, which is how Dan knew it was the truth. 

“You don’t even know me.”

“I want to though. I mean, if you also wanted to. Know me. That is.”

Dan made either the best or worst decision of his entire life and said, “I want to” and he’d never fully understood what people meant when they said someone _lit up_ until Phil did exactly that, like there were sunbeams in every pore. 

Phil said, “Okay.”

“I’m really odd though. You haven’t seen the full extent of my oddness.”

“I have the feeling that I’d still like it,” Phil flushed again. “Can I see - are you free tonight? Or is that too soon?”

It probably wasn’t soon enough. “I’m free.”

He thought just once. One date, nothing will happen. And then I can make an excuse. I have a long distance boyfriend. I’m in the army and being re-deployed. I’m moving abroad. Anything. 

Phil smiled like Dan had just presented him with everything he’d ever wanted. “Okay. My shift finishes at eight. I’ll meet you here.”

“Right here? In front of the painting?”

“Seems to be our usual meeting spot.”

~*~

There’s a message on the Manchester phone. It says _lunch @ 1. Tomorrow. Meet me by tables at back of gallery. No one goes there. Need to talk to you._

Dan texts back _will be there_ instead of the essays that he could write to Phil. All the unsent emails, letters, postcards, packaged carefully together in the bottom of a suitcase he never uses, abandoned in one of the Camden flat’s spare bedrooms.

~*~

The Sea at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer was beautiful in the evening, when the gallery was closed, illuminated only by the light above it. Dan stopped to take it in.

It was literally right next to the door. The gallery was six rooms. He could walk in off the street, cut it out of the frame and walk straight back out with it tucked under his arm. Why was he still here, four weeks in?

Phil said, “Hey” with a surprised lilt in his voice, like he honestly hadn’t expected Dan to show up. He was wearing blue and Dan never wanted him to wear any other colour. “I thought we could go for food. Is Italian okay? I know a really nice place.”

Dan remembered feeling awkward. Or more awkward than normal anyway. He said, “Yes, Italian is great” because, just one night was fine. Just once. He added, “you look good” just to see Phil flush.

Phil instantly said, “so do you” and Dan shrugged like he hadn’t just spent a full hour re-arranging his fringe in the staffroom. 

The spark between them, and Dan had always thought the idea of a _spark_ was ridiculous, was now a firework. Growing into an explosion. 

When they walked out of the gallery Phil brushed his hand against Dan’s, deliberately, completely obvious, and the explosion somehow became a supernova.

Dan thought, mind completely fuzzy, just once, I’ll go with the moving abroad excuse then it’s fine. No problem.

He wandered in the wrong direction, brain still not working properly, and Phil said, “Hey, where are you going, don’t leave me” jokingly, when Dan turned around he was making an exaggerated sad face. 

Dan laughed and said “As if I would.”

~*~

Mark comes into the gift shop. He’s wearing a practically sprayed on white t-shirt with a deep v neck and Tina completely zones out while serving another customer. Zoe has to wave a hand in front of her face.

Dan says, “I thought you were trying to be inconspicuous.” 

Mark, utterly bemused, says “I _am_ , what’s wrong?”

Dan shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. What’s up?”

“I wanted to know if you could show me your best books about the Turbine Hall. I’m doing a project on the shows you’ve had there.”

The books about the Turbine Hall are exactly where Mark’s recording bug is, in one of the quieter corners. Books that no one ever buys. Dan sighs and says, “Right over here, Sir”

They wander over. Mark runs his hands over the covers, every so often leaning forward to catch the underneath of the display table. He says, “PJ asked me. To check.”

“Inside voice Mark.”

“That _is_ my inside voice,” Mark says, in what he probably thinks is a whisper. “He asked me. There are things missing. He’s noticed,” his eyebrows are doing all sorts of odd things, trying to hint. 

“Oh, okay” Dan raises an eyebrow back. 

Mark finishes his completely pointless survey of the book table and shakes Dan’s hand, almost crushing his fingers. “Thank you for showing me the books, sales clerk.”

Dan rolls his eyes. “You’re welcome, Sir.”

When Mark has left (not before Tina had asked him to put something on a high shelf, just because, and then proceeded to stand and stare at muscles in his back) Dan opens his hand to find, as expected, a small piece of note paper.

It says: _PJ is suspicious, noticed missing sections. I said the equipment could be cutting out, sent me to check. Pretended in case he is watching. Asked me about you and P. Please speak to him. I’m a terrible liar_

The last time PJ and Dan had talked about Phil it had been on an overnight train to Edinburgh, just after the Manchester job, and it hadn’t exactly gone very well. Dan has no desire to relive it.

~*~

The Italian was closed, Phil had mixed up their opening times. He apologised a lot and Dan had said, “Phil, I don’t care, I’ll go anywhere. Even Nandos. I don’t care.”

They’d gone to Nandos.

Phil, on his third glass of cheap rose, said, “So what’s your story? Where were you before you appeared in our gallery?”

“I was studying law. Taking a year out to clear my head, it got a bit stressful, in the middle,” almost the truth. Close enough. “It’s not so bad, the cleaning. I like looking at the art. What about you?”

“I’ve just done a Masters, about to go to London to start a post grad. Just getting some money before I start. I like the art too, even if I am a pretty rubbish security guard. I don’t think I remotely intimidate anyone. It’s lucky it’s such a small gallery and no one ever visits besides groups of school trips.”

Dan couldn’t even begin to think about most of that so he said, “A post grad? That’s cool, doing what?”

“Editing mainly, it’s what I studied and I love it.” Phil finished his rose and said, “Do you love law?”

“Ha - no. I wanted to study music. The piano. My parents said that wasn’t a proper career and that I should do something more grown-up, so - law.”

Phil frowned. “Do you still play the piano?”

Dan, at that point, hadn’t played the piano in years. He still hasn’t. The piano represents too much, makes him feel too much. The waste. “Not really. Not for a while.”

“That’s a shame.”

Dan shrugged, “it’s not a shame really. Some things just don’t work out. And I don’t even have a piano anymore.”

Phil said, “I’ll buy you one. With my first editing paycheck.”

Dan had laughed then, he remembers. His proper laugh. “Really? We’re planning that far ahead? You’ve only just taken me to Nandos.”

“Well, first Nandos, then -” Phil had stopped on whatever he was going to say next. “Then other stuff.”

“Other stuff?”

Phil had hesitated, drunk a rather large gulp of wine, and then said, “everything”

“That’s a lot of stuff.”

Phil smiled, blushed along his cheekbones, “I suppose it is.”

~*~

The picnic tables at the back of the gallery are always free, mainly because they back onto a fairly dodgy looking back alley of the theatre next door (and are also falling apart). Dan sits on the least damaged table and recognises Phil from what seems like miles away.

Phil walks slowly, shoulders hunched. He sits, unexpectedly, beside Dan, rather than opposite, leaves a careful few inches between them. 

Dan freezes, feels all the places that they’re not touching, thinks about months ago, when Phil would have sat so that they were leaning on each other, from shoulder to ankle, how Dan would have probably ended up in his lap by the end.

Phil says, “Thanks for meeting me.”

“Did you seriously think I wouldn’t?”

“I don’t know what I think. I don’t know anything about you,” Phil replies, mildly. 

Dan exhales, harshly, as though he’s taken a punch to the face. “Fuck. We’re getting straight into it then.”

“That’s not why I asked you to meet me. To talk about that, I mean. I wanted to…. You’re here for something, I’m guessing.”

Dan says, “yes” because what’s the point in lying, where has lying got him exactly? Sat on a picnic bench exactly three inches away from the person you love, that’s where. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry it’s you again. But when they told me, I just, I had to see -”

Phil interrupts, “what is it?”

“The painting?”

“Actually don’t tell me. I’d rather not know. I just wanted to say that, this, it’s not the Manchester Gallery, it’s a big deal. They have cameras, a direct link to the Met, it’s not some tiny gallery with one useless guard.”

“You weren’t useless.”

“All evidence says otherwise,” Phil is resolutely facing forward. Dan is, as always, turned completely in his seat to look at Phil, staring at the side of his face. Phil says, “it’s not the same. You could get caught, easily.”

“I’ve done it before. More than once. Actually around forty times. In bigger locations than this. You don’t have to -”

Phil closes his eyes, holds them closed. “Of course you have. Done it before. I keep forgetting.”

“This is the last one. The last time. Then I can-”

Phil blinks. “I thought I’d made you up. You disappeared so quickly. It was like it had never happened. I kept finding things you’d left around the flat and I’d think, wow, he existed after all. He was actually here.”

“Let me explain. From start to finish. I know it’s a lot to take in-”

Phil says, “I couldn’t get enough though, you know that. I loved you so much. I couldn’t - the first time I saw you it was like……there you were. But I couldn’t _keep_ you, it’s like I was always chasing you, that you were always just a tiny bit too far away from me. But sometimes you _weren’t_ and that’s when I would think oh, here you are, finally, with me, it was like a shade coming up.” 

Dan, helplessly, says, “that was -”

“That was the real you, wasn’t it? When it was just us. That was Dan.”

Dan says, “yes” with all the feeling that he has. “It was. I swear it was.”

Phil turns to face him, at last, makes eye contact. “It’s too late now though.”

“Don’t say that.”

“How can it not be?”

“Phil, I didn’t want to do it. I promise you. When I found out - I tried to stay away, I did, I couldn’t, you were just so……”

“So what?”

Of all the millions of words Dan could say what comes out of his mouth is “perfect.”

Phil says, “what does that mean?”

“That you were everything I ever wanted.”

Phil makes a pained little noise.

“You still are, I -”

“You’re not being fair. Saying stuff like that.”

“It’s the _truth_.”

“When have you ever been big on the truth?”

It hurts because it’s completely warranted. Dan winces. “It was real, Phil. With you, it was real. The only thing I didn’t tell you was my real name.”

“And the whole art thief thing.”

Dan says, “how could I? It was never the right time, then it had gone on too long, and then I _loved_ you, and -”

Phil puts a hand over his face. Dan thinks, for one stricken second, that he’s crying, but then Phil takes a deep breath and then drops his hand back to his lap. He says, “Dan, I’m not going to tell anyone. But don’t steal the painting, whatever painting it is. Please, for me. After last time; it can’t happen again. I don’t want you to get caught.”

“It’s not just me, I can’t-”

“Don’t do it.”

Dan says, desperately, making the most of the opportunity, “could we ever-”

“Don’t,” Phil stands. Dan, almost on reflex, grabs his sleeve. “Please.”

They freeze like that for a second, Phil standing up, Dan on the bench, his hand clutching at Phil’s wrist. Phil sighs, a sad sigh, like it’s causing him physical pain. Dan lets go. 

Phil says, “what I said before, in the shop. That I wouldn’t lie for you again. I didn’t mean it. I always would, if I knew it would help you. That’s the worst thing.”

“Phil -”

Phil for a second looks like he might sit back down, almost looks like he’s having an internal argument with himself. He finally says, “seeing you is difficult. I’ll stay out of your way from now on.”

“But I don’t want you to.”

“You have to stop saying things like that,” Phil reaches out and touches Dan’s cheek, lightly, exactly where his dimple is. “It’s not fair”. He holds his hand to Dan’s face. Dan leans into the touch, instinctively. “Don’t do it. It’s too risky. I can do what I can but -”

“Don’t do anything. I don’t want you involved.”

“I need to know that you’re okay,” Phil runs his thumb along Dan’s cheekbone, distracted, like he doesn’t realise he’s doing it, then pulls his hand away.

“I’ll be okay. I’m always okay,” Dan says. “Don’t get involved. Don’t do anything that’s going to make people question you. I don’t want you getting into trouble,” the word _trouble_ half dies in his throat as he’s saying it.

Phil notices. “Trouble? You mean like last time? Believe me, my reputation is already pretty bad; people question me if I’m a minute over on break, if I look at a painting for too long. I’m the guy who let a Van Gogh get stolen, after all.”

The unspoken _and you’re the guy who stole it_ hangs in the air between them.

Dan says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please believe that, even if you don’t believe anything else.”

Phil says, “I believe you. Don’t do anything stupid.”

He looks like he wants to say something else but instead he turns on his heel and walks away. 

Dan sits and watches him go. Which is something of a role reversal.

~*~

Dan thought _just let me have this once. One night. I’ll never speak to him again_.

Phil said, “coffee?” and Dan said “yes” even though they both knew coffee wasn’t necessarily what was on offer. Dan doesn’t even like coffee. But he can do this whole dance of pretending, the fake casual walks to people’s flats, had done it numerous times before, even if had felt different all those times, had never felt the sense of anticipation, the brushing of their knuckles as they walked up to Phil’s floor, slightly too close together.

Phil’s flat was cozy and neat, full of scented candles and house plants, with a huge DVD collection and stuffed anime characters dotted everywhere. Lots of photos of Phil - with parents, maybe a brother, friends, lots of friends, in various locations wearing various woodland animal knitwear. In one he was holding a shar pei puppy. Phil looked identical in every photo, smiling so hard that his eyes were almost closed, as though overwhelmed by how much he was enjoying life in general. 

Dan thought _I could seriously fall in love with you_ even though he already was, more than a little bit. He could picture them together, Phil’s sheer exuberance balancing out Dan’s anxieties; Dan getting him to slow down a little; he could join in the friend nights out, go on all the holidays, let Phil talk him through the entire DVD collection, help him keep the houseplants alive. _We could be so good together_.

He followed Phil out into the kitchen. Phil was standing in front of the fridge, looking slightly confused. The fridge was covered in more photos, lots of postcards, including one of The Sea at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer 

Dan took that one off the fridge. The back said _try not to get it stolen. Only joking :) Martyn_.

The postcard fluttered out of his hand when he pushed Phil against the fridge, displacing a million magnets, and kissed him.

Phil raised his hands immediately to Dan’s hair, like he’d been fully expecting it, and made a surprised noise in his throat, like he really hadn’t been. Dan caught that noise, and all the other tiny sweet noises that Phil made, in his mouth, saving them, bottling every gasp and _oh_ into the Phil part of his heart, already trying to forget them.

Phil broke away, gasped when Dan kissed along his jaw. “I don’t actually have any coffee.”

Dan laughed, mouth just under Phil’s ear. “I wasn’t expecting any. I actually hate coffee.”

Phil said, breathless, “I feel like I’ve been waiting to do this for long time, even though we only met like four weeks ago. Is that weird?”

Dan mumbled, “no, not at all” into Phil’s neck. He thought _just once, one time_. He sucked a bruise, just above Phil’s collarbone, slightest hint of teeth.

Phil said, “Dylan” and pulled Dan up to kiss him properly, with a full body shiver that Dan stored away, with everything else. 

Later, when they were no longer pressed against the fridge, and were in Phil’s bed, Dan on top of him, arms bracketing Phil’s head, cataloguing every sound Phil made (for what? _Next time?_ There couldn’t be a _next time_ ), Phil kept saying _Dylan_ over and over and Dan had hated the name, hated fictional Dylan, hated everything about him. 

He mouthed _my name is Dan_ into the base of Phil’s throat (“what are you saying?” Phil said, later, “when you’re mumbling into my neck like that?”) - _my name is Dan and I can’t stay_. 

He hadn’t meant to. After, when Phil had looped an arm around his waist and settled his head into the crook of Dan’s neck with a contented little sigh, he thought _just tonight_.

Then the morning, Phil with bed hair and glasses, _just for breakfast_.

 _Just today. Just until the end of today_.

Phil, soft and gentle, in a grey jumper covered in foxes, padding around the kitchen in socked feet, attempting to make a thai green curry because Dan had said he liked it - “stay again tonight?”

Dan said “yes” _stay. Stay always_.

~*~

When he gets back to the flat Mark is sat under the Wisteria, bottle of red wine and two glasses on the table in front of him. He looks tired, a little flustered, his laptop is right across the other side of the room, like he’s slammed it shut and then walked away. More Skype, Dan supposes.

Dan says, “you okay?”

Mark shrugs. “Fine.”

“Thanks for giving me the note. I’ve been too careless, I didn’t mean to put you in an awkward position, with deleting stuff. I’ll speak to PJ.”

Mark says, “tell me about Phil. Tell me all of it.”

Dan says, “ _why?_ ” he glances at the laptop again. “Has something-”

“Because I feel like you’ve never told anyone all of it and I think you should. I’ll tell you mine.”

“What, so we can have a group therapy session?” Dan says, more curt that he’d meant to. Mark’s face falls. “I’m sorry, I just don’t see what good it would do. And I’ve had a really hard day.”

“It helps,” says Mark. “I think it would help you. You need to make sense of it.”

“There is no sense. I lied to him and I stole from him. That’s pretty much all of it.”

“What was the painting?”

It’s such an odd question that Dan takes a few seconds to answer. He sits down on the sofa, opposite Mark. “The Sea at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.”

“Oh. I always preferred the seascape. From that series. Stormier.”

“I do too,” says Dan, giving Mark a surprised look. “I mean, if I’d had the choice. Felix didn’t even want it. In the end. Said it had taken too long and the moment had gone. What was yours?”

“Mine?”

“The tiny LA gallery?”

“Oh. It was Drought in Paradise. Beautiful. I have no idea where Felix put it,” Mark pauses, pours wine for him and Dan, both glasses right up to the brim. He gives his computer a brief glance. “She chased me down the block. She was crying, I was probably crying. It wasn’t worth it. Felix just said hey thanks man and then where did the painting even go?”

Dan sips his wine, spills some on his sleeve. “You should try to talk to her.”

“Nah, it’s done. She called the police, let them into my LA place, as I just found out. It’s finished.” Mark looks at Dan, considering, “but I don’t know if yours is.”

Dan, reluctantly, says, “there’s not much to tell, really.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Dan takes a breath, and begins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cleve Gray's Whisper (or The Dan) is [here](http://www.artandantiquesmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/201309_gray_01.jpg).
> 
> Jackson Pollock's Greyed Rainbow is [here](http://www.jackson-pollock.org/images/paintings/greyed-rainbow.jpg).
> 
> The Seascape at Saintes Marie, or Fishing Boats at Sea, (again by Van Gogh) is [here](http://www.vggallery.com/painting/f_0417.jpg).
> 
> And Jose Bernal's Drought in Paradise is [here](http://www.artnet.com/usernet/awc/awc_workdetail.asp?aid=424903755&gid=424903755&cid=114968&wid=424910304&page=46) and has never been stolen from a tiny gallery in LA, just to clarify.


	4. you see i've always known you'd go (the manchester job)

It should have been one of the simplest ones, really. One of the easiest jobs he ever did. He and PJ had been in Liverpool, picking up another Matisse (Felix went through Matisse phases from time to time) when they’d got the call. 

(The Matisse, that time, had been Woman With a Hat. Dan hated portraits, still does, hated the way they seemed to look disapproving, like they knew exactly what he was doing. Woman With a Hat was particularly so, throwing some spectacular side-eye over her shoulder. When they got it back to the flat Dan had turned her to face the wall)

Felix said, “this tiny gallery in Manchester has randomly got the Saintes-Maries series, get it for me”

“What, _all_ of them?” said Dan. “That’s like nine paintings.”

“Not all of them. The boat ones, mainly. And I only want one - the best one. Please, you have to get it for me.”

Dan had hesitated, he’d like that on the record. He’d thought it was a bad idea. “A Van Gogh though? It’s going to have its own personal security, surely? It’s risky.”

“Well, there’s the random thing,” Felix said, triumphantly. “They don’t. There’s like three security guards in the entire place. It’s only about five rooms. You could walk in off the street. No stress involved.”

Felix said that about a lot of jobs. Dan had actually believed him on this one, which was an obvious mistake.

~*~

Skip to a night train to Edinburgh, sitting on a table seat in first class with PJ and Caspar, ordering tiny bottles of red wine every time the refreshment trolley came around.

Caspar took the last one “hey, maybe you should slow down” (Dan hasn’t seen Caspar, in person, for a while. This was probably the last time: he’d got on the train at York, carrying a massive package that contained a Georgia O’Keeffe [disguised as an Amazon parcel] , tanned and blond as ever. He’d been in a great mood at first, as Caspar always is, but that hadn’t lasted, thanks to the general atmosphere. Dan misses him)

Dan had snatched it back. “I’m fine.”

PJ, out of nowhere, said, “Dan, you need to snap out of this.”

Caspar looked affronted on Dan’s behalf. “It’s been like two days, PJ, give him a break.” He didn’t attempt to retrieve the wine bottle.

“What did you think was going to happen?” PJ sounded like he was trying to be nice about it, but going completely the wrong direction, saying the wrong thing. “It was only ever going to end in one way.”

“ _PJ_ ” said Caspar.

“I mean, what could you do? You did what Felix told you, you-”

“Oh, so _that’s_ the main thing,” Dan said. “To do what Felix tells me.”

“It’s what you signed up for,” PJ replied. “And you completed the job. That’s what you were asked to do. No one asked you to get that involved.”

“PJ, for fucks sake,” Caspar interjected again. “Don’t say that.”

Dan crunched his plastic cup in his hand, one of the sharp edges nearly cut his palm. Caspar sighed and leaned over, took that away too. Dan said, “I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m sorry? Like it’s never happened to anyone before?”

“No one’s saying that,” Caspar replied, instantly. “Are they PJ?”

“It’s the number one rule,” PJ said, because he can’t help himself. “But you know, it’s a learning curve, won’t happen again.”

~*~

“You’re telling the end before the start,” says Mark. “Tell it properly, stop jumping around.”

Dan says, “oh, right, sorry. That’s just how I talk sometimes.”

“Start at the _beginning_.” Mark has somehow poured them both another glass of wine. Dan can’t even remember drinking his. “The actual beginning.”

“I noticed that you lied before by the way,” Dan sips his wine, even though he actually wants to down it. “About the Jose Bernal. You said you didn’t steal it, when we met for this job.”

“I did,” Mark agrees. “I’m a better liar than I thought, obviously.”

“Why did you?”

Mark again casts a look at his laptop. “I guess I was having some difficulty with admitting it to myself. And I wanted to help you but I couldn’t bring myself to say the whole thing. You know?”

“Believe me, I _know_.”

~*~

They did the Mona Lisa thing because it always works. The gallery was too small to justify two people on the ground so Dan did it, Louise did surveillance and PJ did his usual.

PJ said, “we’ll be done by the end of the month. They aren’t even looking after it properly. After any of them, actually, we could take them all.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” said Louise. “But it does look stupidly easy. There’s even a basement that has an exit into an open alleyway. Who even built this? Where’s the security?”

PJ shrugged and clapped his hand to Dan’s shoulder. “Dan, if this takes any longer than three weeks, tops, then I’ll be seriously questioning your skills.”

Dan, who had already been questioning his skills daily by that point, said, “I prefer to take things at a nice, steady, pace, you know that.”

“Nice and steady? Is that what we’re calling it?” PJ sighed. “I’ll sort the cleaning job. Try and look believable about it this time though. And commit to the name, don’t look surprised every time someone calls you Dylan.”

(He still had done that. The surprise. Slight rabbit in the headlights look of bewilderment. It had both confused Phil and made him laugh. _You look like that’s not even your name_.

Phil probably understands that a little better now).

~*~

Dan, in his beige cleaning uniform, frozen in the act of half heartedly mopping up a school trip induced spillage, staring at Phil, who is looking back at him. Phil is smiling the smile from all his photos, the one that crinkles his eyes, Dan is smiling back and he knows he looks fond. Can you be fond of someone you’ve only known for a few weeks?

He’d stayed for one further day, in Phil’s perfect flat, and then left.

He’d planned to use the moving abroad excuse. This was the perfect moment. He had it all ready in his head, exactly what to say. What actually came out was:

“I missed you.”

Phil looked pleased. “Really? It’s been a day”

A day had felt like too long. Like an eternity. “It feels like longer. Somehow.”

Phil said, “I know. It’s like I’ve been storing up all these things to tell you because I haven’t seen you for twenty four hours and I want to know what you think of everything.” He looked slightly flustered when he finished speaking, like he’d said too much, more than he’d planned. Phil was always like that though, heart on his sleeve at all times, completely honest. 

“Tell me about them. I’ll tell you what I think then.”

“It’s mostly me getting into a series of never ending awkward situations, I’m not going to lie. This is what happens when you leave.”

Dan laughed. “Like it’d be any less awkward when I’m there?”

“Well, then it would be _shared_ ,” Phil’s expression softened, which shouldn’t have been possible since it was already pretty soft. “Come over tonight?”

 _I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’ve been meaning to tell you that I’m moving abroad at the end of the week. Please don’t be too suspicious if the painting disappears at around the same time. No one will blame you._

Dan said, “yes”, the complete opposite of what he should have said and yet exactly what he wanted to say.

~*~

In Phil’s flat they had kissed in the hall, the living room, against the wall by Phil’s bedroom door, greedy and slow at the same time, an odd pace that Dan could barely keep up with, Phil’s hands constantly moving, like he was checking Dan was still exactly the same, as he’d left him, fingers clutching at the fabric of his shirt.

“I swear this isn’t why I brought you here,” Phil said, on a rare gasp for breath. “I had a very innocent evening planned. I was going to cook. We were going to watch Buffy. Very sedate.”

Dan brushed their noses together. “We can do all of that after. Because I didn’t have an innocent evening planned, really.”

When Phil kissed him again it was gentle, so sweet that Dan sagged a little under it. Small biting kisses along his jawline to his ear. 

Phil mumbled, “it’s weird, how you make me feel.”

Dan’s voice was raspy, catching on the edges of letters, “weird in a good way?”

“In the best way. But like I’ve known you for a while, like we’ve met before and now you’ve come back,” Phil huffed a laugh at himself. “That’s sappy and a bit creepy, I’m sorry.”

Dan started to say “no, it’s -” but then Phil kissed him again, dirtier and messier, and suddenly he couldn’t think of the words anymore.

~*~

Felix said “where the fuck is my Van Gogh, Daniel?”

“I’m working on it.”

“It’s been six weeks. PJ’s done two other jobs in that time, what the fuck?”

“Do you really want _that_ Van Gogh? They’ve got Irises here too, that’s nice” he hadn’t liked it at first but the colours have grown on him, plus the security guard in charge of Irises is a dick and keeps overflowing his coffee cups so they spill and Dan has to clean it up. “Hm?”

“ _Flowers_?” said Felix, in disgust. He only steals the florals if Marzia’s birthday or their anniversary is coming up. “I’m giving you two more weeks, this is getting embarrassing.”

~*~

Sudden realisation of “I’ve somehow stayed in your flat for a week” which was a pretty random thing to say in the middle of your possible boyfriend kissing his way down your chest.

Phil looked up, amused, “yeah, you have. Did you not notice?”

“I don’t think I did” vague recollection of going to work and spending most of the shift staring at Phil with a probable dazed expression on his face. And Phil walking to him as they were signing out at the end of the day, saying _stay tonight?_ , and Dan always saying _yes_.

“Do you want to go? Obviously not right now, but -”

“No, I don’t. I’ll stay next week. The week after.”

“All the weeks.”

“Every single one of them,” Dan propped himself up on his elbows. “Get back up here.”

Phil did, settling his knees either side of Dan’s hips, “hi.”

“Hi yourself,” Dan said and kissed him. 

(Phil was loud, beautifully so, a steady stream of tiny noises and gasps and words, things that he could never really recall afterwards, Dan loved every single sound he made, every single shiver, because Phil constantly moved, mapped every inch of Dan with his fingers, like he was memorising him. 

He said _Dylan_ a lot and it was like a small pull under Dan’s rib cage every time, the way that Phil said it, the sweetness and awe in his voice. 

_Please say my name like that, one day_ mouthed into Phil’s shoulder.

“I wish I knew what you were saying,” Phil said, often, afterwards. “I can feel you saying stuff but I can never hear it.”

 _Please forgive me, when I tell you. I’m starting to think that I can’t be without you, you’re the best thing that’s ever happened_ mumbled into the soft skin on Phil’s hip.

Dan said, lightly, “I’ll be louder” but he never was [he never had been, really, which apparently was surprising].

 _I wish things were different_ pressed over and over, numerous times, against every inch of Phil’s body)

~*~

“So _you’re_ Dylan?” Phil’s friend Chris, giving him an appraising look, standing in the type of poorly lit hipster bar that Dan hates and loves in equal measure. “Phil doesn’t stop talking about you.”

Dan had startled again on Dylan, almost corrected him. “What? Yes, I am. And, uh, good things I hope.”

Cat, standing next to Chris, “you’re as cute as he said you were.”

“Thank you?”

Chris said, “I was going to give you the hurt him and I’ll hurt you talk but you haven’t stopped heart eyeing at each other since you came in so it’s probably not an issue.”

Dan laughed and it sounded vaguely hysterical, to him. 

Chris probably wishes he’d given that talk now. He probably also regrets saying, “I’ve never seen him as happy with anyone as he is with you.”

Phil turned to check on Dan, from the other end of the bar, smiled encouragingly when he saw him with Cat and Chris.

Dan smiled back at him (it was essentially, a film scene where everyone else went slightly blurry, and there was just Phil, only Phil, the one thing he would ever want and need) - “he makes me pretty happy too, so that’s good.”

Cat said “awwwww”, sounding somewhere in the distance.

Phil mouthed “okay?” trying to be subtle but being completely obvious.

Dan mouthed “yes” back and then, in his head, oh god I’m officially in love with you because that was somehow the catalyst, the supernova point, across a dingy dark bar, through a crowd, Phil smiling at him and checking that he was okay because he knew Dan wasn’t great with meeting new people, and Dan wondered, wonders, if that was it - the confirmation that he could make someone happy, be the one person that they wanted to spend their time with. 

He was aware that he’d frozen in the spot, a little. Phil, still smiling, raised one eyebrow and mouthed “really?” and Dan had to walk over to him. 

“You looked like you’d zoned out,” said Phil. “Like you do when you’re looking at the Van Gogh. What were you thinking about?”

Dan leaned over and kissed the small exposed space behind Phil’s ear. “I was thinking about something Chris said.”

“Nothing embarrassing about me I hope. He knows a lot.”

“No, the complete opposite. And then I started thinking about how happy I am, which was an odd experience.”

“You say that like you’ve never been happy before,” Phil gave him a concerned look. 

Dan said “no, I - that came out wrong” but it hadn’t, he’d actually said exactly what he meant to say. For once.

~*~

“Daniel” said Felix. “Are you being fucking serious.”

It wasn’t a question. Dan said, “yes?” which was. 

“I’ve given you three more weeks. Three. I don’t know what the fuck is going on but you need to get it together.”

“I’ll do it soon. There’s just some things I’m sorting out.”

“Do it by the end of the month. I mean it.”

~*~

Phil, taking him to a (too fancy) bar that had a piano and doing a triumphant little ta-da! as he stood beside it. Dan playing an awful rendition of Fur Elise because he was horribly out of practice, even if it did get better as he went along. Phil, applauding like it was the best thing that he’d ever heard.

“I’m usually better than that. I mean, I used to be.”

“It sounded great to me.”

The expressions of everyone else in the place seemed to disagree, but Dan really only cared about one person’s opinion. He said, “I should practice more. That’s not a true reflection of….”

“Well, I loved it,” said Phil, proceeding to play an incredibly loud and obnoxious version of what Dan thought was the Attack on Titan theme but couldn’t be sure. A lady at the bar covered her ears. Phil sung ba-di-ba-di-ba happily alongside the music, accompanying himself. 

Dan leaned in to attempt to play the melody. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Or the best!”

“The best worst, maybe,” Dan finally managed to get a decent harmony going, even if the piano was a bit sharp sounding. It added to the whole experience. “You’re ridiculous.”

Phil ended with a triumphant smash that sounded like a million musical keys crashing into each other all at once. “We should do that again.”

They didn’t. The manager basically told them never to come back. Outside, in light drizzling rain that made their hair curl, Dan repeated, “you’re ridiculous. Thank you”, and kissed Phil under a lamp post, like they were in an Ed Sheeran song.

“Thank you? For being ridiculous? You’re welcome.”

“That and for finding me a piano. Even if I’d have to wear a disguise to go back there now.”

He kissed the raindrops off Phil’s cheeks, made his hair even curlier by twirling it around his fingers, Phil leaning in to make it easier. Dan said, “when you said it sounded like I’d never been happy before, that’s not quite what I meant. This is just a different level.”

Phil leant right in, so their foreheads were touching, “a different level of happiness? I get that.”

“That’s why I said thank you.”

“Okay. You’re welcome, again,” Phil gave him a considering look, though they were so close to each other that it was a little cross eyed. Out of nowhere he added “it’s strange, how everyone else seems a bit faded when you’re around.”

Dan, startled, had laughed (or, rather, a tiny ha noise that didn’t become a full laugh), and said, “that’s what it’s like for me. With you. Like the world has a dimmer switch on.” He scrunched his nose up at himself, at them, under a lamp post, kissing in the rain. “This is adorable. Don’t say ‘so are you.’”

Phil, mouth open to say just that, said, “I wasn’t going to.”

~*~

They never went to his flat. Felix always just gave up whatever apartment he had in that city for jobs, except they were normally penthouses at the top of chrome coloured buildings. The Manchester one was particularly chromey and penthousey. Not exactly where a cleaner would live. Impossible to explain away.

Dan said, “I have housemates, they’re always around, we’d never be on our own. And besides, I love your flat.”

Phil said, “well, I love you being in my flat, so that works out.”

It had bothered him though, Dan could tell. Where are we never at your flat? Where are your _friends_? You have housemates, why have I never met them? Where do you go when you’re not with me? All questions Phil was probably too polite to ask.

~*~

There were photos of Dan on the fridge now. Front and centre. Photos of him in some of the giant frames in the living room. Photos on Phil’s phone, laptop. All from Phil’s point of view - not many with Dan actually looking directly at the camera. A softer, gentler version of himself that he didn’t think existed anymore.

Phil’s favourite, the one that was (at the time) his phone background, was Dan half turned, catching Phil in the act of taking the photo. Both dimples on show. A look of utter fondness on his face, sleeve pulled right over his knuckles, hand to his mouth. His smile looked like Phil’s, eye crinkles and all, and he’d never thought that he could even smile like that. 

Phil had laughed, in a vaguely concerned way, and said, “are you getting emotional over a photo of yourself?”

~*~

Felix said, “it’s been two months, nearly three” and his voice was devoid of any of its usual Felix-ness. “What’s going on? Seriously?”

Dan said, “ _nothing_ , I’ve just - I sort of lost track, but I’ll do it.”

“You sort of lost track? I don’t think you ever _had_ the track, on this one.”

PJ came to see him at work, which wasn’t usual practice. Meant something was up, that the job was going wrong. The first non work person that Phil had ever seen him interact with, Dan could feel him staring, from the Van Gogh.

PJ said “what’s going on? I didn’t tell Felix but I - on the surveillance, I’ve noticed….”

Dan fidgeted under his gaze. “I know. I know what you’ve noticed.” 

“You’re never in the flat either,” PJ watched him wince, pull at his fringe. “I’m not going to make you admit to anything, but it’s dangerous, it can only end one way, you know that.”

“Can it? What if -”

“There isn’t a what if,” PJ reached out, touched his shoulder. “You need to stop before it goes too far.”

It already had. Gone too far. PJ wasn’t to know that.

Phil didn’t ask who PJ was. When they’d met after work he’d given Dan a long look, as though waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t push. Didn’t question. Never did.

~*~

(Phil gasping, Dan’s hands on his belt, “look at you, you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, I can’t believe -”

Dan, pulling back, “look at me? Look at _you_. I never want to look at anyone else ever, I -”

“All I do is look at you. I see you, at work, when you don’t see me and -”

“How do I not see you? I’m always looking at you.”

“-and I can’t believe that I get you like this too. That you actually…. I don’t know, that you actually want me.”

Dan, ensuring that he was meeting Phil’s eyes, “I’ve never wanted anyone so much, you have no idea, I -”

“It’s too much and not enough at the same time.”

Dan, dropping to his knees, “it’s neither of those things. It’s perfect.”)

~*~

He planned it for a Wednesday because Phil didn’t work Wednesdays.

“Thank god this is nearly over,” said Louise, when they met for lunch. “I can’t stay in that awful apartment any longer. I have no idea how this even took so long.” 

He wanted Phil kept as far away from the whole mess as possible. 

“It was just a bit more complicated than I thought,” Dan replied, breezily, casually, like it was nothing. “Hasn’t been so bad though, Manchester, I mean.”

He knew Louise knew something. She did surveillance after all, and was pretty good at it. The best. If PJ knew that she definitely did too. He could see the quizzical looks she kept giving him, the leading questions. He’d tried to keep it subtle in work but -

“You could stay here after, if you like it so much,” Louise said, hinting tone to her voice. “It’s no problem to me, I’ll take the parcel to Felix.”

“You can’t do that” they always delivered in pairs. Safer somehow. “I’ll come back, after it’s done.”

(What had he planned exactly? How much was he going to tell? If he’s honest with himself, really brutally honest, he was never going to tell Phil about the whole “job”. He could come up with a fairly elaborate lie for the name, something that could make some sense, but he knew he could never justify the other part)

“If you need to talk to me about anything you can, you know that, right?” Louise gave him a flash of a concern. 

Dan should have told her then. Maybe she could have helped. Rather than waiting until they were zooming through Manchester in a pink Fiat 500, Van Gogh squashed in the back seat, when it was all too late.

~*~

He tried to keep it subtle in work, but it was almost impossible sometimes. Phil was an open book, emotions all over his face, hearts all over his sleeve, anyone could tell.

(Dan is usually a closed book, the most closed it’s possible to be, with a padlock that has the key missing. He puts on a front depending on who he’s talking to, the company he’s with, has spent so long under fake names that it comes too easy, the falseness. He started noticing little things: his real smile, his real laugh, the little real affectations in his accent, all the secrets that he normally downplays or hides completely) 

Phil, spotting him across the gallery floor, surprisingly busy with a couple of school trips, lighting up and blowing a kiss, so completely obvious.

Dan, rolling his eyes, but also miming jumping into the air and catching it, pressing his hand to his cheek, smashing the kiss right on his dimple.

Phil laughed delightedly, so loudly that all five rooms of the gallery could hear him.

~*~

Dan said, “Phil, if I’m a bit late back from work tonight, don’t worry, okay?”

Phil frowned. “Why would I worry? How late do you mean? Is there a cleaning emergency?”

Days late. Weeks maybe. “Pretty late. Just don’t stress. And if I don’t answer my phone for a while, it doesn’t mean I’ve left. I’m coming back.”

“This is an incredibly stressful conversation. Is everything alright?”

“It will be. Just trust me, I will come back. I just need to do something and then I’ll be back and we’ll have a lot to talk about and you might not like some of it but….. I’m coming back. Okay?”

“Am I allowed to know what’s going on?”

“Not yet. But soon.”

Phil, completely trusting, always so trusting, said, “okay. As long as you’re okay. And as long as it’s not for, like, weeks or something, because then I’ll worry that you’ve been abducted or something.”

Dan had kissed him at the door like he was going to be gone for years (like he was going to war), like he was drowning and Phil was his only life source, like he wanted to remember every single inch of him. 

Phil, breathlessly, said “wait, how long are you expecting to be gone?”

“Not long” Dan kissed his forehead. “And I’ll be back. I promise.”

Phil said “well, I’ll be here. Exactly where you left me.”

~*~

Later, at 10:30, standing in supply cupboard five, the one nearest the Van Goghs, waiting for the signal that Louise had disengaged the alarms and cameras for thirty minutes, having signed himself out of the building as Dylan for the last time, Dan had texted Felix to say:

_this is final job. Will bring vg to you but then planning to stay in Manchester for a while afterwards_

Felix had replied with a string of confused face emojis, three of the dollar bills and then about a hundred of the fist bumps, which probably meant something but Dan was too on edge to work it out. 

Message from Louise: _alarms and cameras offline for 30min. There is one guard in building, judging by security pass data, but currently in staff room. Not sure who as they used standard pass, must have forgotten theirs. If you move quick you can get to basement before they start rounds_.

~*~

Phil, extreme bedhead, the kind t hat turned his fringe into a full quiff, a quiff that was getting steadily taller because Dan kept running his fingers through it, saying “you should come to London with me. When I start my placement. I’ve got one more job on my security contract but it’ll probably be in a gallery there, so…...come with me”

Dan stilled his hand, fingers splayed out in Phil’s hair, “seriously?”

“Yes. I mean, if you wanted to. I just wouldn’t want to go without you.”

“ _I_ wouldn’t want you to go without me,” Dan said, softly. “I’ll come. I’ll find a way.”

Phil beamed and said, “good. I was worried you were going to say no.”

“Why would I have said no?”

“Because the whole thing is moving pretty fast?”

“It seems pretty perfectly paced to me.”

“Dylan.”

Dan rolled to face him properly, making eye contact, and said, “I love you”, which was the first time he’d said it where it wasn’t mumbled into Phil’s neck or collarbone. “I’m happiest when I’m around you. I don’t want to be anywhere that you’re not.”

Phil looked somewhere between stunned and completely and utterly elated. 

Dan whispered, “say it back then.”

“I say it all the time. I couldn’t say it more.”

“I meant with actual words.”

“I love you. Since, forever ago. I’m happiest when I’m around you -”

“Don’t just repeat what I said.”

Phil smiled and said, firmly, “and I don’t want to be anywhere that you’re not.”

~*~

One of the other paintings, another in the series, was Fishing Boats at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Ink and pencil. The same as their painting but completely devoid of colour.

Dan stopped to look at it, even though he was already short of time. Like their painting but not quite as beautiful. Not quite as perfect. He imagined looking at the pair of them side by side; how they would compliment each other. Is there a metaphor there? Probably. 

(Felix texted again to say _wait u r stl on mnchester jb?!?_ with three of the shocked, hands clasped to face, Scream emoji.)

He didn’t risk cutting The Sea at Saintes Maries from its frame. It was too dangerous, with a Van Gogh, the slightest miss would ruin it. He unhooked it from the wall instead, in one safe, beautiful piece, and carefully encased it in a cardboard cleaning supplies box, wrapped in fabric. 

It was ridiculously heavy but Dan was used to that, prepared for the slight buckling of his knees when he stood. He clasped the painting to his chest, hugged it almost, looked at the space it had left on the gallery wall. 

He said “sorry” aloud even though he had no idea who or what he was apologising to.

~*~

“I don’t know if I’d change any of it though,” he says to Mark. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that happy, for those months, I had so many chances to walk away and make something up but I never did. I wanted it to be forever.”

Mark, perched on the end of the sofa, completely involved in the whole thing, says, “that’s understandable. I mean, anyone would have felt this same. This job is pretty lonely, you can lose sight of yourself a bit. We've all been there.”

“I think Dylan was the most myself I’ve been since this all started. He just didn’t have my name.”

~*~

He’d delayed too long looking at the paintings. He was only halfway into the basement when he heard sudden footsteps above him, someone walking towards the door. There was no way he could make it to the exit before they came in.

Dan said, “fuck” under his breath, probably a dozen times. There were old display tables dotted around, easels and glass cabinets, but nowhere to hide. He hated this part, even though it was almost always his fault because he _always_ took too long, it drove Louise crazy.

He’d seen a heavy looking display case, just about tall enough for him and wide enough for the painting, and was halfway to it when the door opened.

The person who entered the basement was, of course, Phil. In his ill fitting security guard uniform, holding a torch. One side of his collar popped out. Expression determined but slightly worried, like he wanted to investigate but was terrified to actually do so. That expression quickly turned into utter confusion when he saw Dan.

Dan, involuntarily, made a choked _oh_ noise, and in doing so completely ruined any chance of being able to explain the situation away.

~*~

Phil in red plaid, flushed in the face because he hated arguments, just back in the flat after a night out with his friends, which Dan had been late to for Felix related reasons. “I can never catch up with you, it’s like you’re never here, not properly.”

Dan said, “I’m _here_. There’s nowhere else I would want to be.” He had moved to stand closer to Phil. They always did that, completely unaware of it happening, until they were almost nose to nose, hand to hand, blinking at each other in surprise even though it was utterly inevitable. “I’m sorry I was late.”

“I feel like there’s so much going on with you that you don’t tell me. You _can_ tell me, you know that. I just-”

“I know. And I will, at some point. You might just not like me very much after it.”

Phil said, sincerely, “I don’t think that’s possible.”

“I’d rather not put that to the test just yet.”

~*~

Dan said, “you changed your shift” completely nonsensically, like _that_ was the issue. “You weren’t supposed to be here.”

Phil was completely frozen, his eyes the only things moving, flickering between Dan’s face and the painting he was holding at his front. Equally nonsensically, he answered the question “I swapped. With Joe, he needed -”

Dan repeated “you weren’t supposed to -”

Phil’s voice was hoarse, like he’d spent the past few minutes struggling for breath. He said, “what’s that?” even though he knew, must have done, could have recognised the shape of the painting anywhere, would never have thought it was actually a box of cleaning supplies.

“Phil.”

“Are you _stealing_?”

Dan had approximately five minutes before all the alarms went off. He had no clue what to say and so said nothing at all, tried to communicate with Phil with his eyes alone.

Phil dropped his torch (or rather, just let it slip from his hand) and said “is that _my_ painting? Is it the Van Gogh?”

Dan nodded slowly.

Phil made a really sad noise, somewhere between a gasp and a sob, and covered his face with his hands. He said, muffled, “is that what all of this was about?”

“All of what? All of _this_?” Dan gestured between the two of them. “No, absolutely not, I swear, I lo-”

“Why? Why are you -”

“It’s my job, I have to - I’m sorry.”

“You’re _sorry_?”

“Phil, please, the alarms will go off in two minutes, I don’t want you to -”

“This is your _job_? This is what you _do?_ ” Phil dropped his hands from his face but kept them clasped to his cheeks. 

His radio crackled. Louise’s voice suddenly interjected between them. “What’s going on? Is everything okay in there?”

“Fine!” said Dan. “Small delay, that’s all.”

“Dan, you don’t have much time. Get out of there.”

Phil made another noise, like he’d been winded, like Dan had walked over and punched him in the heart. Dan abruptly hung up on Louise saying something else.

Phil said, “your name.”

“I know.”

“It’s not -”

“No, it’s Dan. Dan Howell. Everything else was true: I’m from Berkshire, I dropped out of uni, I have a younger brother, I have -”

Phil said, yelled really, “oh great, so you just lied about your name, that’s fine then.”

“Phil, I couldn’t - this was the job, and then I met _you_ , and then it was too - what could I have done?”

The alarms went off. 

Phil yelled, “the complete opposite of what you did! _That’s_ what you could have done!” His hands fluttered around his face, he clasped one to his forehead, and then over his eyes. “I knew, I _knew_ , it was too good to be true, it was so….. Was it ever real? Us? Was it ever -”

Dan didn’t yell. He said, “it was real Phil, I promise. Everything was. I _love_ you. This whole situation, it got away from me, I was going to come back, we were going to be together, I was -”

He stopped, realising that he was speaking too quietly, Phil couldn’t hear him over the alarms. His hand was still over his eyes, hadn’t even noticed that Dan was talking. 

Louise, on the radio, said “ _Dan_ ”, to which Phil made another tiny, sad noise. “ _Dan_ , I’m serious.”

“That’s why we never went to your flat, why you never talked about anyone, why you were always _alone_ , and I thought - I must have been the easiest target ever, oh my _god_ , I knew that you were too - _look_ at you,” Phil dropped his hand again, starting clasping and unclasping them. “I can’t believe this. But actually I do.”

“You weren’t a _target_ Phil. Please believe me.”

“I thought you were so _sad_ , when I first saw you, I thought, I’d really like to make him happy, I could -” Phil’s hands continued to move, clasping, unclasping, into his hair, covering his face, pointing at the painting “and all along you just wanted -”

The doors locked, with a metallic little click and absolutely perfect timing. Louise said “fuck”, which was serious because she never swore ever, and then said “the police are coming to the top of the building, the main entrance, where the hell are you?”

Dan said, “the basement. I’m in the basement. Where I said I would be.”

“You can’t get out of there, they’ve activated the autolock, why does a gallery this small even have that?” he could hear Louise clattering away on her laptop keyboard. “I can’t-”

It was all background noise really, the alarms, Louise, the heavy footsteps that started becoming obvious on the floors above, the shouting - it was all muffled when he looked at Phil, who was leaning against one of the old easels, staring right back at him. Staring at him like he didn’t even know who Dan was.

Dan said, “Phil.”

Louise said, “Dan, you need to come up with something. You’re going to get caught, I can’t override it, I can’t -” 

Dan said, to the radio, “it’s fine, it was my fault anyway.”

The shouting above got closer, there was a heavy thud from somewhere, a door being kicked open possibly. Phil shook his head like he was just waking up, or recovering from being stunned.

“That’s not true,” he said. “It was my fault. For believing you.”

Dan said, “that’s not -” but Phil had grabbed him, by the elbow, as rough as Phil was capable of being, no affection in it whatsoever, and dragged Dan over to the left exit door. The one that came out into the alley. The quietest one.

Dan said, “no, I don’t want -”

Phil punched in the security code, overrode the lock, had to do it twice because his hands were shaking. The door unclicked. Louise said “what did you do?”

“Phil, they’ll know, that it was you, what will -”

“Why would you _care_?” said Phil. “Take it, get out, I don’t want to _see_ -”

Dan hadn’t moved, even when Phil had thrown the door open and pushed him towards it. The noise was getting closer, no longer above, more to the side, nearly at the basement door.

Phil said, “ _go_ ” and there had been tears, actual tears, in his eyes.

“I’m sorry.”

“Just go.”

Dan said, “I love you, you don’t understand -”

Phil had pushed him through the door, maybe had said _go_ again at the same time, and Dan had done so, had gone, was outside in the alley before he quite realised what had happened, the door slammed behind him, locked again, almost exactly the same time he heard about ten extra people burst into the basement. 

Dan had banged on the door, he remembers that, they just couldn’t hear him over the noise. He turned, pressed his ear to the wood, but he couldn’t hear anything really, just lots of voices with no way of saying who was who.

He didn’t stay. He punched the door, cut his knuckles doing so, heard a far off car horn (short and insistent, obviously for his attention), Louise on the radio saying I can _see_ you, why are you standing there?, and he hadn’t stayed. He’d left Phil behind the closed door. 

Louise, parked at the end of the alleyway, so pale that her blusher was two pink spots on her cheeks, said “what the hell happened? Why are you crying?”

Dan said “am I?” and realised that he was.

~*~

He’d tried to be subtle in work but it became too obvious, with the blowing kisses and the radiating happiness, like cartoon characters with little hearts over their heads, only half a second away from yelling _i love you_ at each other over the gallery floor, like it was overflowing from them.

Dan said, “we should maybe tone it down in work” meaning he didn’t want Louise to see, on the surveillance. 

Phil said, “I suppose. What can I do instead?”

The next time Dan had seen him, Phil had kept a solid poker face but given his popped out shirt collar a sharp tug, out of nowhere. Dan raised an eyebrow. Phil winked at him.

Later Dan said, “really? We have a signal now?”

“It’s subtle right?” said Phil, happily. “I was going to make a heart with my hands but I couldn’t do one properly” he held his hands up, a squashed oval shape between them. 

“So a shirt collar tug means…..”

“Anything you want. But mostly I love you and I wish I could tell you in work but you said it was too obvious.”

He did it every time, after that. Dan had no idea that a pull to a shirt collar could make him so happy, but apparently it did. 

(months in the future, in a gift shop where his name was Liam, reaching out to touch Phil’s collar, leaving his hand there. Phil freezing under his touch. A shirt collar tug mostly means I love you. And I wish I could tell you).

~*~

Felix said, “I don’t want it. The moment’s gone now.”

Dan, slightly strangled sounding, said “ _what_ ” more of a statement than a question.

“I’ve satisfied my Van Gogh urge,” Felix gestured to the mantlepiece, to Starry Night Over the Rhone (a gorgeous painting, the kind that makes you catch your breath). “Alfie got it. You were taking too long. I forgot you were even still on that job. It never ended.”

“You don’t want it. You don’t even want it,” Dan was aware that he was clenching his hands into fists. Marzia gave him a concerned look. “You have no idea what I went through to get that painting. You said -”

“What you went through?” Felix looked confused. “It was a five room gallery, what the fuck could have -”

Marzia said, “Dan, are you okay?”

Felix, always needing the obvious pointed out to him, suddenly said “what happened? It was an easy job, I don’t get -”

Dan found he couldn’t speak. There was a lump in his throat that he knew would become a sob if he did, there were tears pricking in his eyes. The Sea at Saintes Maries sat propped up on Felix’s Arlo & Jacob sofa, completely where it shouldn’t have been. 

Marzia said “Dan” again, gently, like he needed to be soothed, like she was trying to talk him out from behind something. “Stay and have some lunch, we can -”

“Yeah!” said Felix, trying for the same tone and failing. “We can go out, grab some -”

Dan said “I loved him” and as expected it came out as a wail, like he was tearing it from his heart. He then said “fuck you Felix, you have no idea, what you _do_ , how much you -”

Felix, startled, said “do you need a break? I have a place in Lisbon that’s nice, you could -”

Dan had stormed out at that point. He said “sorry Marzia” before he did, because he always remembers his manners, but he’d still slammed the door so hard that all the paintings and sculptures in the apartment made a sad rattling noise. 

The Sea at Saintes Maries had stayed on the sofa. Completely unwanted.

~*~

The John Singer Sargent (Lady Macbeth, Dan hates it, as he hates all portraits. Something about the intensity on her face makes him uneasy) which arrived the day Felix phoned about the llama job is still propped in the hallway. Mark hates walking past “her”, hates her eyes, her stance, everything. They’ve turned her away but Dan can somehow still feel her staring).

A delivery had come four weeks before it. That one has not been opened.

Mark, fifth glass of wine, says, “why? I hate thinking of art being all packaged up like that. What is it?”

“I know what it is,” says Dan. “It’s for me.”

Realisation dawns on Mark’s face. “Felix sent it to you? _Here?_ ”

(there was probably no malice involved. Felix is, ultimately, not a bad person - he’s obnoxious sometimes (most of the time) and frequently speaks without thinking but Dan knows what his thought process would have been. It had been rescued but now Dan needed rescuing. Possibly).

It’s still wrapped in cardboard in the flat’s smallest bedroom. Dan had torn open the top corner to peer in, the smallest gap, and still felt his heart constrict. Three tiny ships, lonely in the middle of the painting. All the blue, serene, ocean and sky. Van Gogh painted it to show the effects of the sun on the waves, signed his name in bright red letters to make the point, bottom left corner. The Sea at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. The cause of all this angst. Impossible to look at without hearing Phil’s voice. “Rescued” and then discarded. 

Mark says, “well, that’s fucked up.”

“The whole thing is, Mark, let’s be real.”

“It is,” Mark agrees. “But it doesn’t sound like it’s beyond repair.”

Dan raises an eyebrow. “It sounds like that to me.”

“I think it will be if you do this job.” 

Dan suddenly sits up in his seat, startled, “I don’t really have -”

“You can walk away whatever Dan. You just either do it with the money, new life, house and all that jazz, or you do it with Phil.”

“Phil isn’t an option.”

“How do you know that?”

“Did you not just listen to any of what I said?”

“Sometimes you need to just stop making excuses and procrastinating and actually fight for something,” says Mark. “If it means that much. If it means everything.” He gives Dan a long serious look. “It can be fixed.”

~*~

Phil, laughing but concerned, “are you getting emotional over a photo of yourself?”

“No,” but yes. “It just doesn’t look like me, really.”

Phil said, “that’s why I like taking photos of you when you’re off guard” then, more seriously, “that’s what you look like.”

Dan had looked at the Happy Dan in the photo, holding up his sleeve covered hand to cover his smile, and said “really?”

“That’s how you look to me.”

“Maybe it’s just how I look when I’m around you.”

~*~

Louise and PJ had been the ones to tell Felix, in the end, the patched up versions of what they knew. What PJ had worked out. What Dan had sobbed to Louise as they drove up the A56, somewhere in between repeating "Louise we have to go back, I left him, we have to go back".

The note on the Saintes Maries parcel, in Felix’s over-the-top swirly handwriting, had said: _Dan, I think you could probably find a better place for this than I could. It’s yours. I hope the memories aren’t all bad ones_. Marzia had probably told him what to write but the thought was there. 

Phil kneeling in front of the painting to console a weeping eight-year-old, not wanting her to be scared by his height.

Phil saying that’s my favourite too, everyone always walks past it. 

Phil observing you really like this painting. I mostly just like all the blue. 

Why do you think the boats look lonely? I thought it was meant to be a happy painting. 

Phil doing tremendously awkward finger guns and saying see you around I’ll be here. At the painting. 

Blue of the waves illuminating the blue of his eyes. 

Dan clutching the painting to his chest and saying I love you you don’t understand.

Not all bad memories. Just that the bad ones are really bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Henri Matisse’s [Woman With a Hat](http://www.galleryintell.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/422px-Matisse-Woman-with-a-Hat.jpeg) and her spectacular side eye
> 
> Van Gogh’s [Irises](http://www.jackygallery.com/images/Irises%20by%20Vincent%20Van%20Gogh%20OSA409.jpg)
> 
> Van Gogh again - [Fishing Boats at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Fishing_Boats_at_Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.jpg) (or the Dan version of The Painting, metaphor alert!)
> 
> More Van Gogh - [Starry Night Over the Rhone](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/Starry_Night_Over_the_Rhone.jpg/1280px-Starry_Night_Over_the_Rhone.jpg)
> 
> And John Singer Sargent’s - [Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth](http://c300221.r21.cf1.rackcdn.com/john-singer-sargent-nigra-lux-sargent-john-singer-18561925-1459946943_org.jpg) (Mark's feelings on her facial expression are the same as mine, sorry Ellen Terry)
> 
> (this was a bit of a Van Gogh fest of a chapter, oops)


	5. Chapter 5

“It seems,” says Mark “that we’ve talked a lot about you but not much about him.”

They’re on bottle number four. An expensive looking Shiraz that was hidden in one of the kitchen cupboards, like Felix was keeping it for something. Mark had said _fuck Felix!_ and uncorked it. They’re both pretending that it’s good. 

“What do you mean?”

Mark says, “he helped you. He let you out. You’d given him your full name and enough info for anyone to find you but he never said anything. What does that mean?”

Dan has pondered that a lot, since. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”

Mark reaches out, grabs Dan’s shoulder, says “you need to know what’s on offer here. I meant what I said.”

That part of the conversation seems hours ago. Dan can’t even remember what Mark said. Stop making excuses and fight for something? Possibly. He gives Mark what is probably a fairly pathetic look.

Mark says, “hey, c’mon sport” because when he’s tipsy he apparently becomes the dad from an American sitcom. “Do you at least feel better for talking about it?”

Dan says, “no. Yes. I don’t know” because it’s easier to cover all outcomes.

~*~

Talking things through, from the start to the end, had left an odd feeling in his heart. A nostalgia for something that wasn’t even over yet. All of the things, the little moments, that he’d forgotten until he’d been speaking and suddenly - there they were. He felt like he was reaching out and every single second was falling through his fingers, grains of sand, that he couldn’t catch, couldn’t keep hold of.

When he was a kid, and had done something wrong, his mum would sit him down, very solemnly, and say “so how can you put it right, Dan?”, and then listen patiently while ten-year-old him would detail a plan about how to return penny sweets to the shop, or to apologise to his teacher, or his brother, or whoever.

If he’d spoken to his mother in the past few months (which, he should probably phone her. Soon), if he told her everything, admitted he isn’t actually on the world’s longest gap year, she would say the same thing: 

So how can you put it right, Dan?

~*~

Louise phones (on his actual phone). He hugs his mobile to his ear like he’s somehow hugging her voice, which is as warm and comforting as ever.

She says “how’s it going? I still disapprove but, how’s it going?”

Dan says, “it’s going. I think PJ will have thrown us all in the Thames by the end.”

“He did tell me. About the plan. It’s a good thing I didn’t take this job, you’d never get me on a boat” there’s background noise, the ocean possibly, like she’s out walking on a beach. “Have you seen him? You don’t need to tell me”

“I have. We’ve talked.”

There’s a pause. Louise says “I’m judging by your voice that it didn’t go the way you wanted.”

“Does it ever?" he sighs and says, “Louise, can I tell you something? But you can’t tell anyone.”

Louise instantly replies “I won’t. You know I won’t.”

“I’ve got my own plan. For this job. It won’t get anyone else into trouble, I promise, but I have a different…. I don’t know, a different -”

“Agenda?” Louise supplies. “Reason for doing this?”

“Can you come to London? I’m in the Camden flat.”

Louise says, “of course you are. And of course I will. I’ll be there by the end of the week.”

~*~

The thing is, the secret thing, that no one knows, is that he _had_ gone back. That was the _not entirely_ that he’d said to Mark, weeks ago. He  had gone back, a stupid, reckless, idiotic thing to do, considering the amount of people he could have run into.

It was a month later, which ended up being too late. 

Phil’s flat no longer had Phil in it. When Dan knocked the door a pretty red haired girl answered and, for a second, his heart crashed to his feet, thinking the worst for a split second, but when he looked over her shoulder he saw that the flat was completely different, all traces of Phil gone.

The redhead was confused and obviously a little freaked out but answered all his questions fairly politely: she’d moved in a week ago, she’d been lucky to get the flat so quickly, in such a nice location, but the last tenant had moved so suddenly.

“Is that who you’re looking for? I don’t know any more than that, I’m sorry.” Dan could almost see her thinking, working it out. “If you find him, he left a few plants. Tell him I’ll look after them though.”

The plant in the hall, a dieffenbachia in a little red pot, already looked far healthier than it ever had before. Dan could hear Phil saying _I don’t get what I’m doing wrong, why is she wilting?_. The plants were always hes and shes, with their own names and special locations, always wilting even with Phil feeding, talking to and sometimes singing to them.

“I’ll tell him, if I do. He’ll be happy about that.”

He’d walked from the flat straight back to the train station and has never been back to Manchester since.

~*~

In some far off alternate reality, Dan likes to think that he did the right thing and told Phil weeks earlier. And that Phil had been okay with it. And maybe Dan could give him paintings, like Felix does with Marzia, he knows exactly the type Phil would like - flowers, plant scenes, bright colours, a Renoir, another Van Gogh because of course it would be another Van Gogh.

Probably a Renoir. Maybe Paysage bord du Seine, painted on a linen napkin (if it hadn’t been stolen in 1951 that is. And then bought for $7 in a flea market. That whole story makes Felix so mad, the carelessness, how it even ended up in the market in the first place), beautiful, the colours, the peacefulness of it. Delicate and small in a huge ornate frame.

~*~

Tyler is ticket clerk of the week again. Three weeks in a row. Dan finds him in the front line staffroom, giving the photo of his smiley self a mournful look. The caption says WELL DONE ASHTON :D

Tyler, seeing Dan, whispers, “is it weird that I wish it said my name?” 

“No, that’s not weird.”

The notice board in the staff room is full of photos of work nights out. Tyler is in almost all of them, always photographed halfway through laughing, head thrown back, eyes closed, like he’s rushed straight into the middle of frame as soon as he’s spotted the camera. 

He says “wow, Tyler, is there a night out you _haven’t_ been on?”

“Probably not, no.”

“You’re in all the photos. That’s risky, isn’t it?”

Tyler blinks at him innocently. “I don’t know, is it?”

~*~

A school trip comes in, which sounds like a pretty dull class outing, to Dan’s mind. Understandably half the kids instantly run off and the teacher has lost about fifteen of them by the time she gets to the main hall, wringing her hands and looking on the edge of tears. She looks about Dan’s age and he can relate, he’d probably lose kids all the time, if he was a teacher. Somehow he and Zoe end up agreeing to help look for them, mostly because Finn was the one who asked.

Finn, gazing into the middle distance, brow furrowed, hands on hips like he’s Batman surveying Gotham City, says “Zoe, you come with me.”

Zoe makes a tiny squeak of a “yes.”

Finn turns to Dan, flicking his fringe as he does so. “Liam, you go with Phil.”

Dan says “what?”

“With Phil,” Finn gestures, graceful swoop of his arm, to Phil, who is standing awkwardly on the edges of their group. Finn flicks his fringe again. “Hopefully none of them got outside.”

Dan walks to Phil slowly, hesitantly, giving him full warning and the chance to leave. Phil stands patiently and watches him approach.

“We’ve been paired up,” says Dan.

“Of course we have” says Phil, in that same neutral tone that he always seems to put on when they’re around each other.

Security Guard 2 says, “good luck Lester. Try not to get any of them stolen.”

Phil sighs. Dan doesn’t say anything, because he’s not really supposed to know, but he does roll his eyes, fairly obviously.

Phil says “I thought we’d try the Turbine. It’s big enough that -”

“Do they speak to you like that all the time?”

“Does it matter?”

They go to the Turbine, Phil walking unusually fast, Dan having to take long strides to keep up. Phil doesn’t speak, keeps looking forward, pretends to ignore the looks Dan gives him from under his fringe. 

The show in the Turbine is You Can Play This: fifty pianos, of all shapes and sizes, painted with different famous portraits. All of the pianos have signs saying “please play me”. Dan, for obvious reasons, hadn’t been to it yet; he feels like he can’t breathe just from being in there. He wants to play all of them but also none of them at all. 

Phil gives him a sad look. “Are you okay?”

Dan says, “no, not really” and follows the sound of someone playing a very slow two fingered version of The Blue Danube. 

It’s a girl, about nineish, in a school uniform. The reason for the slow playing is that she’s sobbing, tear tracks down her cheeks. Her piano is decorated with Girl With A Pearl Earring. Dan reaches out, catches Phil’s sleeve to stop him walking. Phil does.

“Found one. She’s crying.”

Phil looks at Dan’s fingertips on his shirt cuff and says “that didn’t take long.”

“She’s _crying_. I’m useless with people crying.”

Phil says, “well, so am I” and holds his fist out. 

Dan sighs, they do three bounces and Phil picks scissors, Dan picks paper. 

He sits next to the girl and joins in, at a slightly quicker pace. She instantly stops, gives him a highly suspicious look. He says “hi, I’m Dan.”

She says “I’m Esmee. Your name badge is wrong.”

Dan has no explanation. Phil coughs behind him. “Yeah, it is.”

“Why do you have the wrong name on your badge? That’s silly.”

“It is pretty silly, I agree,” Dan holds his hand out “everyone’s looking for you. Are you okay?”

Esmee doesn’t take his hand, leaves him poised in mid air. “They all ran off so I did too but then they left me and I didn’t know how to get back.”

“And then you got scared?”

“Yes” she sniffs. “They left me. And they said they wouldn’t.”

Phil coughs again, Dan thinks _seriously?_ , and says, “I’m sure they didn’t mean to, I -”

She gives him a fairly judgemental look, for a nine year old. “And Oliver went with them.”

Ah, the real story comes out. Dan says, gently, “I’m sure Oliver is coming back. He’s probably looking for you right now. I bet he’s really sorry that he left.”

Phil says, “I’m sure he is. I’m sure there was a really good reason for him leaving.”

Dan gives him a surprised look. “I bet he’s on his way back right now.”

“I don’t think he will be. He’s with Sophia.”

Dan, in spite of himself, says “who’s Sophia?”

“She _was_ with Kyle but now she’s not because he saw her and Oliver at that party Emily had, which I didn’t even want to go to, and now Kyle’s with Annabelle, but I don’t care because I hate Annabelle, but Sophia is, like, flirting with both of them now, which -”

“Flirting with who? Kyle and Oliver?”

Esmee nods. Her tears seemed to have stopped with the gossip. “BOTH of them.”

“Where’s Annabelle in all of this?” Dan asks. Then, “wait, how old are you? What kind of parties are we talking about?”

“I think we’re losing track of things here,” says Phil. “Esmee, we need to get you back to your teacher, she’s pretty worried.”

Esmee says “she’s _useless_ ” which, slightly harsh, but she swings around off the piano bench. She still doesn’t take Dan’s outstretched hand.

When Dan stands up Phil is giving him an extremely odd look. 

“We found one,” Dan says. “That’s enough right? Please don’t make me look for more.”

Phil says “one’s enough. Unless you want to try and find Oliver.”

“ _I_ don’t want to try and find him,” Esmee pipes up. “I hope _no one_ tries to find him.”

Dan, in his best responsible adult voice, says, “everyone’s worth finding Esmee” and she gives him a haughty look, somehow glaring down at him even though she’s about three feet shorter.

~*~

Finn and Zoe find Oliver. He was not looking for Esmee and is not really sorry that he left. Even though she apparently expected it Esmee gives Dan a betrayed look and tells Oliver (who looks, frankly, like the Zayn in a really bad One Direction tribute) “ _Dan_ said you’d be sorry”.

(Finn says “who’s Dan?” and gives Dan a weird kid huh? shrug) 

Tina and Zoe go to early lunch, probably to talk about Finn for an hour. Dan is leaning over the cash desk, chin resting in his hands, effectively putting off any potential customers, when Phil bundles in (literally bundles, like he tripped over something in the doorway and then several other things straight after). 

Dan says, lightly, “so, Oliver was a bit of a douche. He wasn’t worth finding at all.”

“Completely” Phil has the same look as earlier, like he’s working out a difficult Maths puzzle. Or that puzzle is Dan. “I didn’t expect you to give that girl your real name.”

(another conversation for Mark to delete. Dan sends him a silent apology.)

“Why wouldn’t I?” 

“You need to be careful.”

Dan blinks at him. “I am. Usually” then “do all the guards speak to you like that? Earlier?”

“Finn doesn’t.”

“So just every other one?”

Phil says, “what does it matter? It happened. It’s only for two more weeks.”

“Well, I bet you can’t wait.”

“I don’t know now” Phil says. He isn’t looking at Dan, he’s staring at his feet instead “Finn paired us up because he thinks I have a crush on you.”

(in Manchester the staff had called him Heart Eyes Lester for how utterly obvious he was, around Dan. Dan probably would have been Heart Eyes Howell, if any of them had known his real surname, or if he’d actually spoken to anyone except Phil).

“Zoe probably told him about my crush on you, so -”

Phil doesn’t say _don’t_ or _it’s not fair_ or any of what he said last time. He says, “too obvious, that’s our problem” which,  what?, and then “you were nice. To that girl today” which is generous because really he’d been useless. 

“That surprises you?” 

“No, not at all” Phil says. “You should go back and play the pianos. It gets really quiet from 5.”

“Does it?”

“Yeah, there’ll probably be no one else there.”

Dan squints at Phil, trying to find the meaning in his voice, but, as always, it’s too hidden behind the fake placidity. A tone that Dan can never place. “Maybe I will.”

Phil repeats “you should.”

When Phil leaves Dan goes to the book table and removes the bug, clasping it between two fingers. He thinks about stamping on it but he has no idea what these things cost, for Mark, so he puts it in his pocket instead.

~*~

With PJ, in a tiny motor boat, somewhere in Kingston-upon-Thames, hating every second. They’ve already gone through the steering, the motor, realised that Dan doesn’t have the upper arm strength to start it, and then argued about whose idea it was to use the boats in the first place.

They’re ambling along the river, Dan steering (terribly, leaning to the right) when PJ, out of nowhere, “there’s stuff missing from the recordings. I think you and Mark think I’m stupid or something.”

“We don’t.”

“I wasn’t exactly fair to you Dan, I know that. If I could take back what I said, on the train, I would. I was just annoyed that you’d put yourself at risk. And him too.”

“His name’s Phil. You don’t need to keep saying ‘him’.”

PJ says “did you only take this job because he’s there?”

“This is my last job, PJ.”

“And what does that mean, exactly?” PJ shuffles, unsteadily, to the wheel, tries to make eye contact. “Look, I should have spoken to you, I knew something was going on, but I didn’t want to upset you. Or to get you into trouble.”

“That’s the thing though, isn’t it? We never _talk_ to each other. Any of us. Until it’s too late.”

“That’s not true, Dan. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Dan echoes “are we?” because, are they, really? He would class Louise as a friend, Mark too, more recently. Maybe Tyler. PJ had been his friend once.

PJ looks hurt. “Come on Dan. I fucked up, with how I handled the Manchester thing, I know, but we’re _friends_ , I just -”

“You just care about the jobs more,” Dan says. “Which is fine, PJ, it’s not a problem.”

PJ says, “you’re not being fair” and says nothing more beyond casual observations about Dan’s boating abilities (none are positive).

When they part, back on shore, PJ leaves without offering to share a taxi, even though they’re going in the same direction.

~*~

In the Turbine Hall, 5:30, playing a grey piano painted with Millais’ Ophelia (which is a pretty sad thing to put on a piano, Dan thinks. Apart from the flowers). He plays Minute Waltz (because obviously when you haven’t practiced the piano in years you start straight with Chopin), stumbling over the tempo and completely messing up the ending. He gives up and plays Radiohead instead.

He doesn’t realise that Phil’s been sat beside him (piano painted with The Lady of Shalott) until he’s started on Pyramid Song, instantly missing the next note. 

Phil’s sat, cross legged on the piano bench, head to one side, obviously listening intently. He gives the tiniest half smile ever when Dan looks at him (there and gone so quickly Dan almost wonders if he imagined it.)

Dan gets through most of Radiohead’s back catalogue, some Muse and then, finally, Fur Elise, before a rustle to his right indicates Phil has stood up. 

Hand to his back, between his shoulderblades. Phil says “thanks. I always wanted to hear you play the piano more.”

Dan, feeling bold even though they’ve basically been sitting in silence next to each other for the past twenty minutes, says “you did hear me.”

Phil says “once. Only once. It wasn’t enough really.”

~*~

Dan goes to one of the other rooms on his lunch break, looks at the Henri Rousseaus. Some other paintings Phil might like - the plants, the ferns, the animals. Dan isn’t a huge fan of Rousseau; the randomness of crinoline wearing women in a perfectly nice forest scene. A Walk in the Forest would be perfect without the scared looking blonde in the bottom left.

Tyler, next to him, wrinkles his nose (Tyler isn’t really into art, for someone who spends so much time around it). “How did the boating go?”

“Alright, I guess.”

Tyler gives him a sideways glance, over his shoulder, “I’m getting the feeling that you’ve got something else planned.”

“Who, me?” Dan puts on his most innocent face. “Where would I find the energy to plan something else? That’s way too much work.”

Tyler rolls his eyes, which is completely at odds with the small way he says “Dan, can I tell you something?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t hate the Tate.”

“I know you don’t.”

They pause by a Monet (Waterloo Bridge, on Felix’s wish list but not loved enough to actually be rescued. Yet. It’s an oddly sad painting; for one of a bridge, lots of blue, again). 

Tyler says “I actually really love it”, either about the Tate or the Monet. Or both.

“Tyler, you could stay. Say Ashton’s your first name and you’re going by your middle name now, or whatever. You haven’t done anything.”

Tyler, pushing his glasses up his nose, rearranging his blond cloud of hair, says “and are we going to? With your plan?”

“I can’t say yet” Dan says. “And you don’t have to help me, you can -”

“Dan” says Tyler. “Have you ever thought that maybe I already _am_ helping you?”

Dan looks at him, illuminated by Waterloo Bridge, and says “I hadn’t”.

“You underestimate me,” Tyler replies, tapping the side of his nose. “Which is fine, I mean most people do.”

~*~

On Wednesday Dan has to chase a shoplifter who stole three copies of the same book on the French Impressionist Movement (which, _why?_ ) because apparently it’s his turn to do so.

“We take turns in chasing the shoplifters?” he says to Tina. “Do you seriously get that many? Is there a rota?”

Tina nods darkly, in the style of someone who has seen some things in her time. “I’m in heels. So is Zoe. Off you go.”

The shoplifter is a gawky looking student type in a fair isle sweater. He looks as reluctant to run as Dan is, doing about three steps of an almost sprint before going back to walking. The distance between them stays exactly the same.

Dan, half heartedly speed-walking, says “no. Wait. Stop.”

The shoplifter looks almost insulted by the lack of effort. 

Dan is halfway across the front lawn when Phil appears by his side. He suddenly forgets how to walk and almost trips over his own feet.

“Tina said you had a shoplifter,” says Phil, tone flat.

“Yeah, that’s him” Dan points to Fair Isle Sweater, who is now having a leisurely stroll through the groups of tourists picnicking outside.

“He sort of looks like he’s getting away” still annoyingly, devastatingly, neutral. 

“He was too fast for me.”

Phil laughs, which is the first time he’s laughed in front of Dan in, how long? Dan wants to reach into the air and grab the sound. Phil says “you still don’t run?” and it’s his voice, finally, his normal voice, with actual tone.

“You know I don’t. Tell Tina that it was all very epic and that he only just escaped me.”

Phil smiles, a little half one, and looks down at his feet. He says “okay” very softly and turns to go. 

Dan says “Phil.” 

Phil gives him a quizzical look “yes?”

“I wanted to - could we talk, properly? Just us. I don’t want to go thinking that I still haven’t explained.”

Phil stays staring at him for a second. He says “go? Where are you going to go?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Phil is about to answer when Finn flies past them, the elegant straight backed run of an athlete, and takes down Fair Isle Sweater (not a fair match up. It’s like a leopard taking down the weakest gazelle in the herd). Zoe and Tina are both at the gift shop entrance, hands clasped to hearts.

“I had him! I was nearly there!” Dan shouts. They’re far away but he’s sure that he sees Zoe roll her eyes.

Finn, walking past him, not a hair out of place, books under one arm, shoplifter under the other, says “you did a good job Liam” which is sweet but, no. 

When he turns back Phil is gone.

~*~

Almond Blossoms. That’s what Dan would have given to Phil, in the alternate reality versions of themselves. Calming, lots of blue, flashes of pink, cherry blossoms. He’d say _Van Gogh thought flowering trees represented awakening and hope. He painted this in Arles and he said it was the Japan of the South_.

The whole thing breaks down a little when he tries to imagine what Phil would say in reply.

~*~

At the picnic tables at the back of the gallery, which have somehow become his favourite place due to the lack of people (the weather is getting sunnier. There are tourists _everywhere_ ). Eating sandwiches that Mark made him, again, with what looks like an entire loaf of bread and all the chicken they had in their flat.

Phil, out of nowhere, sitting opposite him, giving the doorstop sandwiches a startled look. “It’s the llama, isn’t it?”

Dan, mouth full, raises an eyebrow. 

“The….. I don’t know what you call it, the target? It came to me today, that painting always reminds me of you.”

Dan swallows and says “it’s a bow legged lazy eyed llama, how does that -”

“It looks like something you would like. That you’d hang in your living room,” Phil looks like he wants to smile, his mouth is quirking a tiny bit, at the edges. “And then I read the artist card and it made sense.”

You never saw my living room, Dan thinks. Any of them, in any city. He frowns at Phil, to the point that it scrunches his nose, “I meant what I said before, I don’t want you getting involved”

“I’m right though,” Phil confirms. 

“I don’t pick them. You should know. I don’t pick what I like and just take them. Someone else does that.”

There’s a long pause. Phil, softly, says “I didn’t know that”

“I said -”

“You didn’t, you just said that you tried to get out of it, that could mean anything.”

Dan blinks at him. “You have a pretty low opinion of me, don’t you?”

“I don’t. That’s the thing” Phil tugs at his sleeves. “I’ve been thinking, about what you said this morning. I think….. If there’s things you want to tell me, I’m….. I’ll listen to them.”

“Okay. That’s good. Where do you -”

“Not at work though. I’m in Islington, maybe we could, maybe you could come over to -”

“To where you _live_?” Dan has to sit on his hands to stop from reaching out to Phil. “Are you sure?”

“Why wouldn’t I be sure?”

“I don’t know, because it’s me?”

Phil says, “because it’s _you?_ What do you think I think of you?”

Dan shrugs. “That’s what I was hoping to find out, really.”

He gives Phil one of the doorstop sandwiches. Phil takes it and leaves.

~*~

Dan goes back to You Can Play This, back to the Ophelia piano, plays the first movement of Moonlight Sonata (Phil used to call it the Midnight Sonata, _when I get you a piano you can play it for me. All the time_ , and Dan wouldn’t correct him, would just say _I can’t do the third movement though, it’ll always be unfinished_ ).

Phil arrives, again at the next piano, just as Dan’s about to move onto the second movement. He says “you still can’t play the third?”

“The third’s impossible” Dan replies, and begins. 

Phil sits in silence, a peaceful expression on his face (as much as Dan can tell from the small glances he’s able to make), eyes focused on Dan’s hands. 

Dan stops before the third. Unfinished again. 

Phil says “thank you” like he did last time. 

“You’re welcome” Dan gently puts the piano lid down. “Did you mean -”

“What I said earlier? Yes”

“I meant more about me coming to your flat, not the talking.”

“I meant both of them” Phil stands, stuffs his hands in his pockets. He’s not in his guard uniform, he’s in jeans and the fox sweater, looks like himself. Dan’s heart contracts just looking at him. “Are you ready?”

There’s a question. Dan says “yes” but it’s not convincing, even he knows. 

Phil huffs an almost laugh and says “Me neither.”

~*~

Phil’s flat is the same. Slightly smaller, but the same. The houseplants. The candles. The DVDs. The Tetris lamp. The anime characters. The photos. Dan wants to cry just being in the living room (is Phil’s bedroom the same? Are there the same photos on the fridge?), standing in this place where he had been happiest. It’s almost all too much.

(he’d wanted to cry a little on the tube too, standing next to Phil, shoulders brushing, sharing the same handrail even though Phil had left a careful distance, again, between their hands. Dan’s knuckles had almost turned white from the effort of not breaching the two centimeters between Phil’s little finger and his thumb)

Dan looks in all of Phil’s giant photo frames, the ones with what seems like hundreds of photographs crammed in, all the ones he’s memorised. All the same.

“I liked not having to be myself. In the beginning,” he says. “But then there was you and then I was myself. I wanted to be myself.”

Phil doesn’t answer. He’s still leaning on the doorframe, watching Dan move around his living room like he’s hallucinating, like he dreamt him there. 

In the corner of one of the giant frames there is him. The Photo, the one that had been Phil’s phone background, forever ago. 

Dan says, “that’s me” stupidly.

Phil says, “that’s you” with a lot of meaning in it, the same way that he’d said _that’s what you look like_. 

“You still have this? In your frame?”

Phil looks anywhere except Dan. “I still have all my photos of you. What did you think I’d do with them?”

“I don’t know.”

Phil shifts awkwardly, foot to foot, and says “so why did you -”

Dan waits to let him finish. They’ve spent too much time interrupting each other and leaving half finished sentences. 

“- want to speak to me?” Phil is still fidgeting back and forth. “What more is there to say?”

“There’s everything to say. I haven’t said anything. We keep starting this conversation and never finishing it. You need to know the whole thing. I need to know what happened after. To you.”

Phil says “to _me_? That’s a short conversation. I had one job left, you knew that, and they shipped me off to London in three weeks. I don’t think they really wanted me around much after the….. I think they knew that I knew something but they didn’t have enough to prove it. I said that I’d come into the basement just as _someone_ was going through the exit and that they must have just beaten the autolock. There was nothing to say otherwise.”

Dan pulls his shirt sleeves right over his hands, leaves only his fingertips free. “I drove myself crazy, thinking about what could have happened. I thought you’d been arrested, I thought-”

“You had my number,” Phil points out, completely valid. “You could have asked.”

“I didn’t want to know, if it was bad news.”

“What would you have done if it was?” Phil is staring at Dan’s hands now. He always found it sweet, when Dan did that with his clothes, the sweater paws. “I didn’t want to come, to London. I thought you might come back and I wouldn’t be there. I used to stand in my living room window for hours, looking. Waiting. And then I realised that you weren’t coming back and what was the point.”

Dan exhales, a huge sigh he didn’t realise he was carrying, and says, “let me say the whole thing. Right until the end. Please.”

Phil finally makes eye contact. “Okay.”

~*~

Dan has no idea how to start so he starts with PJ. And the first job.

Phil’s eyebrows are raised so far that they’re nearly in his fringe. “So you dropped out of Law to steal art with a guy you got paired with for a uni project?”

“He was in it before me. And I don’t know, after the first one, I liked how it made me feel. Like I was important. Like we were rescuing all of this unwanted artwork and giving -”

“Rescuing though?” says Phil. “What even happens to the paintings? What happened to The Sea at Saintes Maries?”

“I didn’t used to question that.”

“But you do now?”

Dan says “I did it because I hated my real life so much. I did it because I liked being under a different name, in a different place; I did it because it never felt real. I mean, it obviously _was_ real but I loved how it didn’t feel like it was. Like I never had to be myself.”

“Why wouldn’t you want to be yourself?”

“I never wanted to be myself. Until -” he gestures to Phil. “Until there you were.”

Phil says “me?” disbelievingly.

“I saw you, not the first day, but a few days after, and you were talking to a girl who was lost from a trip or something, and I thought, who _is_ that, I have to know him, and then you were the painting’s private security, and I tried so hard, to stay away, I really did, I -”

“I know you did” Phil sighs, leans forward, “is this the start of the story?”

“Are you the start of the story?” Dan says. 

“Not me, I meant -”

“Because you are. You know you are.”

~*~

It’s a long conversation, takes a lot longer than telling it to Mark, mostly because Phil _reacts_ to everything, leans in like he wants to hear more, then recoils right back like it’s slightly too much. When they get to the basement he says, “I swapped my shift” before Dan can.

There’s no point in recalling the whole basement talk. Dan remembers it, he’s sure Phil does too. He just says “and then you let me out.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

Phil says “it’s obvious, isn’t it?”

“Not to me.”

“Because I loved you. Even when everything else that was going on I just kept thinking ‘I can’t let him get caught, I can’t let anything happen’. It was the only thing I could keep straight in my head.”

~*~

When Dan saw Phil again, walking in through the exit door of the Tate, it was like he’d been frozen in time, like someone had pressed play on a paused scene. Exactly as Dan had left him.

He’d never really stopped to wonder if it had been the same for Phil too. Like he was a Dan paused on saying _I love you you don’t understand_ all of sudden reappearing and saying _let me explain_.

He wants to ask Phil, to grab him by the shoulder and shake him out of the new closed-offness. _Is it the same? Am I the same?_

~*~

At the door Phil says “it’s weird, seeing you in my flat again. I mean, even though it’s a different flat, it’s -”

“It doesn’t feel different. I loved your flat, you know that. It was my favourite place” Dan instantly regrets saying it, making things awkward. He adds, “and your houseplants are all still alive.”

“These are the third rotation of houseplants. And they’re basically clinging to life at this point.”

Dan notices the browning leaves on the calathea nearest to him and says “they might revive”, wondering why they’re doing this, making small talk.

Phil seems to think the same, makes an exasperated noise under his breath, says “I appreciate you telling me the whole thing. I think I needed to know it.”

It’s an obvious _and now you should leave_ direction of conversation but Dan doesn’t want to leave, ever. The general atmosphere, the undercurrent of need and want, is prickling at his skin. He says “Phil.”

“You’re always saying my name like that.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, like it means something,” Phil has pinned himself to the wall, palms flattened against it, at his sides, like he doesn’t trust himself to stand too close. “It’s just me. I’m not much of anything.”

“That’s a lie. You’re everything."

Phil doesn’t say anything, just hangs his head a little.

“And I did come back. But it was four weeks, after. I must have just missed you. I went to your flat but you weren’t there and I thought - I don’t know. I had people who could have found out for me but I was too scared to ask, in case something _had_ happened. I didn’t want to know. Which is no excuse, I know.”

“I thought you might have gotten caught. I was too scared to find out about that too. And then all of a sudden there you were, coming through the exit at the Tate and I hated you so much, for about a second.”

Dan takes a very cautious step towards Phil. “That’s understandable.”

“It didn’t last. I don’t hate you. I never hated you, really.”

“It would have been completely justified.”

“It’s still the same, when I see you. Everyone else fades when you’re around. I thought, when I realised, about your name, that the whole thing had been an act: that _you’d_ been an act, but you’re the same.”

“That’s because it wasn’t an act. It was real.”

Phil says, “I wish we’d met any other way. I wish I’d walked into any other place and seen you there” under his breath. Dan only hears it because they’re leaning into each other, again, without realising. 

Dan, equally quietly, says “we didn’t though. This is how we met. We can’t change it. We can’t walk into a bar or somewhere and pretend we’ve never seen each other before.”

“I don’t think we could have done that anyway,” says Phil. “I always felt that I’d seen you before. That I’d been waiting for you. I’m _always_ waiting for you.”

“It got away from me. The whole thing. I was going to have one time, with you, but I should have known that wasn’t enough.”

“Was never going to be.”

“And then I loved you and here we are.”

“Past tense,” Phil observes, weakly.

“Not really. Never.”

Phil sighs and when he kisses him Dan is completely surprised at the urgency of it, the need (Phil was never like that, before, the tempo was always slow, reverential). Dan’s knees buckle, Phil taking all his weight, pulling him in. Dan remembers this, all of this, how Phil’s hands would go straight to his hair, first, before moving everywhere, pulling at the front of Dan’s shirt. Dan makes a small _oh_ without realising, sucks a little on Phil’s bottom lip, like he used to, Phil shivers, like he used to. 

Dan tries to move to Phil’s jawline, his neck, but Phil won’t let him, everytime there’s the tiniest break for air, he presses into Dan more, like there’s not enough, like there never will be enough. 

When Phil says, “wait” Dan freezes instantly. Only then realising that he has one hand under Phil’s sweater, fingers splayed over the bare skin of Phil’s stomach. Phil says, “wait, I didn’t -” and Dan pulls his hand away.

Dan says, “no, it’s - I understand, with all the talking about it, and I got, I don’t know, I hoped - I’m sorry.”

“That’s not it.” Phil shakes his head, a tic he’s always had, like he’s trying to clear his thoughts. Dan had used to put his hands to his cheeks, fingertips on his temples, and say _stop thinking_. He wants to do that now, clenches his hands into fists to stop himself.

Dan says “I’m gonna go.”

Phil shakes his head, again. Dan has no idea if it’s an actual head shake or not. “I didn’t know that you came back.” he says. “Why wouldn’t you say that first off?” 

“I don’t know. I lose track of what I want to say.”

Phil says, “Dan” for the second time ever. 

“I really think I should go.”

“If that’s what you want.”

Dan lets himself out, lets the door close, instantly turns around, knocks again. 

Phil opens the door within half a second, as though fully expecting Dan to still be there, and gives him an expectant look.

“Is it fixable?” Dan gestures between them. “You and me? Is there any chance?”

(one of them had to say it. And it was probably always going to be him)

Phil takes a while to respond. He looks at Dan like he did the first time, all the other times, like they were seeing each other through a crowd. He says, “how can there be? I would always be worrying about you, that you were going to get caught, that one day you’d go to the wrong place -”

“If I quit?”

“It doesn’t sound like something you just quit, Dan” third time. “How could you fix it?”

“If I did that, if I fixed all of that - if I was just, me. Would there be a chance?”

Phil doesn’t say anything.

~*~

So, Dan. How can you put it right?

Thursday. Mark is on the balcony, tending to the begonias, tidying up the hanging baskets. He’s smiling to himself, almost like he’s having a conversation in his own head.

Dan says, “Mark, you kept notes of the security guard rotas, right?”

Anyone else would have given a sarcastic, you think this is my first job?, answer but Mark doesn’t. He just says “yes, of course I did. Do you need to see them?”

Dan does. He brings Mark’s laptop to the balcony, says “Phil’s late shifts are Thursdays.”

“Yup.”

“I need you to tell PJ that he only works late on Tuesdays.”

“Okay.”

“I need you to say that Thursday is the best day for the job.” 

Mark says, “okay” again, instantly. “Am I allowed to know? Whatever it is that you’re planning, I mean.”

“You will, because I’ll need your help. If that’s okay.”

Mark says, “of course it’s okay. Just tell me what you need.”

Dan says, “okay” and tells him. 

Mark, says, thoughtfully, “ It could work. But what do you get out of it, exactly?” 

It can’t be fixed. Dan knows that, in himself. He says, “it draws a line under it. Sets him free. Whatever he does next is completely up to him then.”

Mark says, “I’ll help, you know I will, but it’s risky. If it goes wrong then -”

“It won’t go wrong. I have a lot of natural luck, on jobs.”

“Luck runs out sometimes.”

~*~

Dan goes to the exhibit first thing in the morning, as soon as it opens, while the earliest guests are still picking up their tickets and brochures. He runs his fingers lightly around the frame of Llama in Meadow, so lightly that he could just be brushing the wall beside it. On the third go his index finger catches on Mark’s bug, dislodges it, sends it to the floor with a tiny metallic ping. Dan pockets that one too.

The artist’s card next to Llama in Meadow says:

Brigitta Palmarsdottir is an Icelandic artist from Akureyri. She painted Llama in Meadow while at university, to cheer up a friend. She states that the painting is meant to represent “braveness in loneliness” - the llama’s determined expression, and lopsided gait, is intended to signify the indecision between remaining alone or taking risks to potentially achieve happiness. The painting was originally named “The Ways In Which We Show Love Without Realising”. Brigitta is honoured to have her collection shown at the Tate.

~*~

“Ridiculous,” says PJ later, in the loudest corner of a bar in Covent Garden, picked so they won’t be heard, under all the other talking. “And I thought ‘Llama in Meadow’ was an awful name”

Mark says “I kinda like it.”

Tyler, turned all the way around in his seat to stare at the bar (because the barman was apparently “cute as fuck”), says “it’s so pretentious.”

“Maybe that’s why I like it.”

Dan says, “that’s why _I_ like it.”

PJ, trying to bring them back on track, as always, says “we have to do it next week guys. You’ve all been on the boats -”

Mark and Dan say “urgh” in unison. Mark had said _I don’t want to talk about it_ when Dan had asked about his trip on the river. Dan hasn’t even spoken to PJ since his. 

“- we all know what the general plan is. We just need to pick the day.” He turns to Mark, drops his voice, “we know we have to pick a day Phil isn’t there, what’s the best, guard wise?”

Mark says, “Thursday. Thursday is the best. He doesn’t work Thursdays. Not at all. Okay” completely the opposite of smooth.

“Okay” says PJ, looking slightly taken aback. “Thursday it is.”

“There’s three late guards,” Mark continues, trying to save himself. “They work in zones, different parts of the gallery. I don’t think they even see each other. The guard on Llama in Meadow covers that exhibit, the two rooms either side and the main ticket area. They do a circle, as far as I can tell, if we time it so that Tyler is in the exhibit when they’re in Room 1, and then leaving through the ticket area when they’re in Room 2, then it should be fine.”

Tyler, completely casually, says, “actually I thought Dan should do it.”

Dan could hug him. PJ chokes on his pint. 

“I mean, they ALL know me. I’ve been to every social event they’ve had and been really loud. And I flirt with all the guards. Like, a lot. I’m in every photo.”

PJ gives all three of them a joint incredulous look. “Tyler, you’re not supposed to socialise with the -”

“I know, but I was bored,” Tyler gives an exaggerated shrug. “Whereas Dan hasn’t spoken to anyone and barely goes out of the gift shop.”

“Like he was _supposed to do_.” 

Tyler says “sorry!” and, when PJ lets his head fall to the table with a soft thump, he turns and gives Dan a hugely obnoxious wink. 

PJ, into the table, says “what is happening with this job?”

Dan mouths “thank you” to Mark and then to Tyler (who he’d underestimated. Who’d apparently had a plan from the very beginning. Tyler, hesitating over Phil’s name on the list, in Hyde Park all those weeks ago).

Tyler says “so that’s settled? Dan’ll do it?”

PJ, muffled against pine, replies “Dan will do it. Just Dan, seeing as how you’re apparently the most famous person at the Tate.”

Tyler, sunnily, exclaims “aw, thanks Peej!” and winks at Dan again. It’s less obnoxious this time.

~*~

When he gets back from work on Friday Louise is in the flat watching Mark (recently returned from a jog, shirt plastered to his chest) put up a camp bed. She doesn’t even need a camp bed, there’s two spare bedrooms. Dan is about to say so but even he has to take a few seconds to observe Mark’s biceps straining as he tries to pull open the frame. Louise’s eyes are practically glazed over.

Dan says, “I know what to do. To put it right” and they both look at him. Mark with one eyebrow raised because he’s already heard this.

Louise says, gently, “you can’t put it completely right Dan, unless you have The Sea at Saintes Maries just knocking about in the flat.” She laughs like this is a ridiculous idea.

Mark and Dan laugh too, slightly hysterically and not at all suspiciously.

Dan says “I need cut-outs, on the security cameras. Like twenty seconds or so, seven should do. Just cut to static or something.”

Louise says “I can do that.”

~*~

To put things right. The drawing of a line. Setting someone free from the months of shock you’ve put them through when you should have just been honest.

Dan says to Louise, Prosecco on the balcony, “it’s always been on my terms, always. I’ve always been the one who knew more than him, and I’m the one who left him. He gets to decide whether he comes back, but it’s with a clean slate.”

Louise says “you’re going to throw this job.”

“I’m going to throw this job” he agrees. “Hey, did you know the painting was called The Ways In Which We Show Love Without Realising originally?”

Louise raises a perfect eyebrow. “That seems pretty apt.”

“Does it,” Dan says, not a question, because he knows it does.

~*~

Phil, in his flat, looking out, suddenly said “I kept all my photos of you.”

Dan, standing in the hallway, looking at Phil, the other side of the doorframe, said “what?”

“That’s my answer. To your question.”

“Is that an answer?”

Phil said “yes. Don’t do anything stupid” and closed the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Auguste Renoir’s [Paysage bord du Seine](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Pierre-Auguste_Renoir's_'Paysage_Bords_de_Seine',_The_Potomack_Company_auction_gallery_in_Alexandria,_VA.jpg) \- which really was painted on a napkin, stolen, and bought for $7 in a market.  
> Henri Rousseau’s [The Walk in the Forest](http://www.leninimports.com/henri_rousseau_walk_in_forest_canvas_print_24.jpg)  
> Claude Monet’s [Waterloo Bridge, London](http://www.wikiart.org/en/claude-monet/waterloo-bridge-london-1?utm_source=returned&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=referral)  
> John Everett Millais’ [Ophelia](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-s0sRpHFLgms/UCFyb_EO0UI/AAAAAAAAAKc/UFNcVcbS3oc/s1600/1851_-John_Everett_Millais_Ophelia.jpg)  
> Van Gogh’s [Almond Blossoms](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Almond_blossom_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg) because every chapter of this story has to have a Van Gogh, apparently!
> 
> There has sadly never been a piano related exhibition in the Turbine Hall - the one mentioned in this fic is inspired by the [Mesa Piano Project](http://streetpianos.com/mesa2016/) (and similar street piano projects).


	6. it's my own fault what happens to my heart (the tate job)

It seems both like yesterday and like an eternity ago that Felix had said “you’ve never been straight” while Dan stood in the Camden flat, staring at the Monet over the mantlepiece and trying not to think about all the things he was running away from, all the things that he’d messed up. The things he did and didn’t do.

He gives Mark the recording bugs back. Mark doesn’t say anything, just sighs and packs them away in his little equipment case. 

They take the postcard off the fridge. Dan says “you already knew the original name of this, didn’t you?”

Mark says “yeah, I read the artist card.”

Dan sighs. “ _When?_ ”

“The first day we went to look at it,” Mark replies, sheepishly. “I thought it made sense.”

“Everyone does, apparently.”

“Do you?” Mark says, fake casual, not making eye contact.

(why had Phil brought the artist card up? What was he even trying to say? What does _I kept all my photos of you_ mean? The Dan in those photos is unrecognisable, even to him).

“I don’t know. I don’t know what makes sense.”

(does it mean _I kept all my photos of the version of you that I used to love_. Or _I kept all my photos of you because I knew you’d come back_ ).

Mark says “come on, you do.”

(The Ways In Which We Show Love Without Realising. The pull of a shirt collar. Finding a piano. Smiling in a photo, so much so that you don’t even recognise yourself. Blowing a kiss across a gallery floor. The rest of the world on a dimmer switch. Letting someone out of a basement)

“It’s what your entire plan is about,” Mark adds. “He’ll know that. Afterwards.”

“That’ll make a change from last time” Dan says, drily. When Mark sighs at him again he adds “I know. I know what you’re saying.”

~*~

Halfway into the Shiraz, when Dan had reached the point of drunk where his words all blended into one, he said:

“He’s different now though. That’s what I thought when I first saw him. He looks like he’s constantly worrying about something, his voice is all weird and flat. That wasn’t what he was like, before. He was so happy that I felt happier just for being around him, you know, he was so constantly UP, and now it’s like -”

Mark, half asleep, mumbled “like he’s got a weight on his shoulders?”

“Yes. But it’s me. _I’m_ the weight.”

~*~

Dan stands at the entrance of the gift shop, on Finn watch but really watching Phil.

Security Guard 2 is being a dick. Phil, who never has any idea how to cope when people in the world aren’t as nice as him, is staring at his feet. His collar is popped out on one side. His hair's a mess.

Zoe, next to him, says, “Tina says that you handed your notice in.”

Dan says “yup, Thursday’s my last day.” 

Zoe notices the direction of his gaze and asks “how did it go? With you two paired up?”

Dan says “fine, I guess. What do you mean?”

She rolls her eyes. “Finn says he’s the nicest guy ever but the other guards are mean to him because of something that happened in his last job. He wouldn’t tell me but Tina found out from one of the -”

“They shouldn’t gossip about him, it’s not fair if he can’t explain himself.” 

Zoe looks suitably ashamed. “I didn’t mean that, it’s just, he’s very brave, I think. They shouldn’t be mean to him.” 

Dan echoes “no, they shouldn’t” and has to clench his teeth against the thought of someone, anyone, being mean to Phil. 

Phil looks at from the floor and straight at the doorway of the gift shop. Their eyes lock. Dan hasn’t seen him properly since the flat visit (which was a pretty awful idea now that he thinks back on it) and he shifts awkwardly under Phil’s gaze.

Phil reaches up like he wants to pull his shirt collar, seems to realise halfway, and then pulls at his tie instead.

Zoe says, “are you going to that night out Ashton’s arranging, for Thursday? I really want to but I can’t.”

Dan knows she can’t. That’s the whole point of it being Thursday, it’s Zoe’s late shift. He checked. He says “you can’t? Why?” all wide eyed innocence.

“I’m working late here. I mean, I _could_ but it’s no time to get ready.”

“I’ll swap with you. If you want.”

She says “oh, Liam, _really?_ But it’s your last day.” 

“It’s no problem. I’ll come along later, after I finish here.”

Zoe claps her hands together “that would be amazing, thank you so much!”

Dan says “it’s no problem” again but he’s already distracted again, looking at Phil.

Phil attempts to tidy his hair (a lost cause) and looks back at Dan, as if there’s a whole world between them rather than a relatively small entrance hall. Dan sighs so loudly that Zoe jumps.

~*~

Louise, in Starbucks, pink in the flicks of her hair, says “I can do it. I’ve got it all set up.”

Dan says “ _already_?”

“We don’t all work to your pace Dan” she replies, but gently. “I know you wanted seven twenty second gaps but I think eight thirty seconds is better. I’ll stay in the flat, Mark’s going to stay in the general area. In case something goes wrong.”

“He doesn’t have to do that.”

“He wants to” Louise smooths her skirt. “Are you really sure about this?”

“I’m sure.” 

She doesn’t look like she believes him. “Me and Mark have written the plan, in terms of the layout and everything. Please read it before Thursday.”

Dan had a tendency to jump straight in and, usually, would read the plan from scraps of notepaper while the job was occurring. “I will. This isn’t like the other jobs Louise, this is -”

“The last one, I know.”

“I mean, it’s important. And also the last one.”

Louise pauses with her cup halfway to her lips. “The rest weren’t important?”

“I don’t think they were really, not to me.”

Louise looks completely unsurprised. “Of course they weren’t. I think you only ever remembered two fake names the entire time. And you could never remember every step of a plan.”

Dan flashes her a smile, left dimple, “well it’s lucky I had you then, isn’t it?”

Louise smiles back at him, a kind of maternal, oh _you_ , smile. “It’s lucky you’ve _got_ me, you mean. I’m not going anywhere.”

~*~

Security Guard 2 is looking after Nighthawks (Edward Hopper - a sad, lonely type of painting, one you can lose hours gazing at), part of an exhibition called The Pleasures of Sadness (of course, of _course_ it is). Dan is tempted to steal it just because he can, would actually take great pleasure in it, would even leave a note saying personally how much of a dick Security Guard 2 is.

Tyler says “so, what’s the plan, Dan?” to go with the other hundred Dan/Plan rhymes that he’s made so far. “What do you need from me?” He’s staring at the sad looking guy in the left corner of Nighthawks, the one with his back to the street. 

“Just to cover for me, that’s all. And to bring the boat.”

“That’s all I’m allowed to know?” Tyler wrinkles his nose. “How much does PJ know? What do I tell him about the one boat?”

“He doesn’t know anything. Just, go to the night out, like normal, act like I’m on my way. Bring a change of clothes for me. Tell him whatever.”

They reach Automat, another Hopper, woman sitting alone at a table, dressed for a date. Tyler says “fuck, that’s the saddest painting I’ve ever seen.” 

Dan says “yeah. He first showed it on Valentine’s Day” (which had always seemed like the type of trolling black humour that Dan could get behind).

“What, is she stood up or something?” Tyler moves on and gives L’Absinthe an appalled look. “I can’t take this angst, Dan. Are they _all_ stood up? Why are they all alone?”

Dan says “they could be waiting for something.”

Tyler says “wow, deep” and scowls at L’Absinthe. “There’s no pleasure in sadness though is there? None of these are happy.”

“Depends how you look at them.”

“Dan, she does _not_ look happy. I mean, I don’t get art, but she doesn’t. She looks sad and drunk. And like she’s been waiting for someone for ages and they haven’t shown up.”

~*~

Felix, on Skype, radiant in buttercup yellow “so Thursday’s the day?”

Why are they Skyping? Dan has no idea - he and Mark are both crammed into frame, which is difficult when Mark’s arms take up half the shot. He says “Thursday’s the day!” cheerfully. Too cheerfully actually.

Mark, who isn’t allowed to talk on account of being a terrible liar, nods enthusiastically. 

“You’re doing the Cleve Gray? The decoy parcels? The boats?”

“Yeah, I’ll sneak them in on Thursday morning.”

Felix says “thank fuck for that. I thought this job was never going to get done.”

Mark laughs, the only one who does, and Dan has to elbow him in the side (has no impact, it’s like elbowing solid granite).

Felix disconnects without even saying goodbye, which is normal. Mark looks surprised by the lack of manners but Dan’s come to expect that, from Felix.

PJ, strangely, hasn’t been in touch.

~*~

Dan goes to the piano for the last time, on Tuesday. He plays a lot of Pokemon themes, cheerful little melodies that are completely at odds with what he’s feeling; the nostalgia of playing them at home, aged fourteen, back when he had his own piano.

Phil, predictably, shows up at 6, when his shift ends. He doesn’t go to a separate piano, instead he sits, legs neatly crossed, on the same bench as Dan.

(he gets in the way, in all honesty, Dan keeps having to lean around him and knocking him with his elbow. He maybe does it on purpose sometimes, pressing his arm against Phil when he doesn’t need to. Phil leans in, slightly)

Phil waits for him to finish the closing credits to Pokemon Ruby and says, softly, “Dan, about last week..”

Dan has to tilt right over to hear him. Maybe that’s what Phil wants. “What did you mean? When you said about keeping the photos?”

Phil doesn’t hesitate, says “come on. It’s obvious. I’m _always_ obvious.”

Dan turns and pulls himself up to sit cross legged too, so they’re facing each other “Is it the same? Am I the same?”

“You know it is” Phil replies. “You know you are. Am I?”

Dan sighs. “You know my answer to that, Phil”.

Phil has a determined expression, like he’s fully prepared for this, knows exactly what he wants to say. He clears his throat and says “last time, when you said I was the start of the story. I thought, I only told you mine from the point that you left.”

Dan says “oh?”

“Let me tell you the rest. The before.”

Dan would like nothing better, he could sit here for hours listening. He pauses for a second and watches the hope flood into Phil’s face. Phil, who is too nice for the world, all the time. He sighs and says “I’m not any good for you, Phil. I’m a really difficult person, I can’t even lie about that. I don’t know if we could ever get over what happened. Maybe you were right when you said it couldn’t be fixed.”

Phil, startled head shake, says “that’s not what I said at all. Where is this coming from?”

“From _me_ , from the truth” Dan reaches out, entangles his fingers with Phil’s. “It’s always me, who lied, who left, who -”

“Came back” Phil supplies. “You’re confusing yourself with what you do, Dan. I’ve been thinking about - I don’t care about what you do. I just want -”

“You said that you wished that we’d met any other way.”

“I also said that wasn’t possible. And then you said -”

“You have to listen -”

“ - that _this_ is how we met and we can’t change it” Phil shakes his head. 

“I wish we could. I wish that I could be in a bar and see you and you could say hi I’m Phil” Dan does a dorky wave with his free hand. “I eat too much sugar and I can’t keep houseplants alive. And I could say hi I’m Dan and -”

“I wear a lot of black?” Phil looks pained, like this conversation isn’t going anywhere near the way he wanted it to when he started it. “I refuse to let myself be happy?”

“I don’t deserve to -”

“Dan, _I_ could make you happy. If you’d let me,” Phil says, gives his hand a squeeze. 

“You could make _anyone_ happy,” because it’s true. Phil  could make anyone happy. It’s just he could make Dan happy in particular. 

“You said, once, that -”

“I was happiest when I was with you? I didn’t want to be anywhere that you weren’t?”

Phil says “why are you talking like this? Why are _we_ talking like this?”

“I meant everything I ever said to you.”

“I _know_ that.”

“But I can’t forgive myself for -”

Phil says “ _I_ forgive you. I do. I’m not just saying that. Why are you being so hard on yourself?”

“I don’t forgive myself” Dan says. “I _don’t_. I can’t do anything until I know that I’ve put it right.”

“It happened Dan, okay? It _happened_. You can’t go back and re-edit it or delete it or any of that, it happened”

“Why are you being so nice to me? Why are you always so -”

Phil says “because I love you” in such a nonchalant tone that Dan would have missed it, if it hadn’t been for the tiny catch in Phil’s voice. 

Dan says “ _why?_ ”, absolutely incredulous. 

“Dan, please” Phil winces, like Dan is causing him actual physical pain. “This is building up to you leaving again, isn’t it? That’s what you meant, the other day, when you said that you wanted to talk before you _go_. Where are you going to go?”

“I’ll tell you, but -”

“Let me tell you. From the start, from me. Please.”

~*~

On Wednesday he phones his mother. She sounds utterly astounded to hear his voice, which instantly makes him teary, which makes her teary and say “oh _Daniel_ ” a lot.

“Oh _Daniel_ , I’ve been waiting for you to phone. For ages. Your father said I shouldn’t fuss but -”

All of these people that he’s made wait for him; it’s turning into quite a list. 

He says “I might come home for a bit, soon. If that’s okay.”

“Of course it’s okay. You don’t even need to ask. You can stay as long as you like.”

He’s only half committed to the lie when he vaguely says “I can look into going back to uni after I -”

She says “Dan, I know you’re not in uni. Who takes a four year gap year?”

He says “what?”

“I’m not as naive as you think. Come back and you can decide what to do next.”

“I was thinking about music, probably.”

His mum sniffs and says “well, of course. Of course you are” then “everyone asks about you. What shall I say you’ve been doing?”

Dan says “oh, this and that. Not much really. I’m sorry I made you wait so long, for me to phone. I’m sorry I made you wait at all.”

~*~

Mark walks him to work on Thursday, carrying three decoy parcels in Tate cardboard boxes, the ones that their deliveries of extra books come in. Inside, there’s some stolen books inside another layer of cardboard box, from a random grocery store in Norway, nothing to trace back to them.

(Mark doesn’t really need to walk with him but they’re going through the motions, in case of Felix, or PJ, watching. Also the third box is pretty heavy and Dan lacks the arm strength to carry it all the way to the gallery) 

When Mark hands the parcels over he says “remember, get as many people to see you as possible. I’ll be around from ten, message if you need me.”

“You don’t have to hang around for me.”

Mark rolls his eyes. “Well I’m gonna. So, message please. Good luck.”

Dan takes the corner without a security camera, breaks the lock to the side entrance, walks straight into the gift shop staff room, and then nonchalantly into the main shop like he’s come from the store cupboard. 

He says “Tina, there’s a few boxes here that we haven’t unpacked. They’re taking up loads of room.”

He’s timed it for the start of Finn’s shift. Tina doesn’t even turn around, or question three boxes of surprise stock. She says “take them through to main storage if there’s no room with us.”

“I need your pass. I forgot mine.”

Tina sighs, throws her pass to him without looking. She still barely glances at Dan when he passes her. 

Halfway across the ticket hall he completely innocently bumps into Tyler, who says, “oh, hey Liam. Those look heavy, do you need me to carry them for you?”, in the loud Shakespearean way that Tyler always says scripted lines. 

Finn, overhearing like he was meant to, reacts as expected with his perfect manners and says “no, I’ll help.”

He carries all the boxes under one arm, like they weigh nothing.

The gift shop section of main storage is empty. Dan smiles and says, brightly, “I guess it’s just extra. Tina didn’t realise.”

“It’s probably to replace the missing stock. You _have_ had a really weird increase in shoplifters lately.”

Dan laughs, sunnily, all dimples “I know, right?”

He goes to security and gets a visitors permit (and also, ironically, a security breach for forgetting his pass), texts PJ to say _delivery made_.

PJ, oddly, doesn’t text back.

~*~

Tina and Zoe get him a leaving card, which is the first time that has ever happened in all his fake named jobs, and one of the books on the piano exhibition because:

“We see you sneaking off there all the time” Zoe jokes. “It’s got photos of all of the pianos, and….are you okay?”

Dan feels oddly emotional. He says “no one’s ever got me a leaving present before” and his voice is tiny, like he’s nine-years-old.

Tina huffs and says “leave a lot of jobs do you?”

The card says, in Zoe’s loopy handwriting, hearts over the i’s, _good luck Liam! We’ll miss you! xxxxxxxxxxx_

Dan says “thank you” completely sincerely and hugs both of them.

~*~

At nine he locks up the gift shop as normal, keys out with his visitors permit, goes to the alley with no security camera to change his shoes. Waits for Louise to do her thing.

The door makes a buzz noise at the same time as she texts _done. Ten mins to sp 4 please_.

He goes to main storage, unpacks the parcels, puts the books evenly back into the Tate boxes, and takes the Norway boxes with him. Two are empty, box three remains full.

He gets to supply cupboard four just on the ten minute mark.

~*~

There’s a Van Gogh in The Pleasures of Sadness, because apparently Dan cannot escape Van Gogh ever. It’s Wheatfield with Crows, which looks like a bit of a nothingy painting, until Dan reads the card stating that it was the last thing that Van Gogh ever did. He wrote to his brother to state that he painted it in a time of extreme loneliness ( _de la solitude extrême_ ). A painting to express sorrow.

Dan stares at it for a long while. Imagines Phil saying _what do you mean? It looks like a perfectly happy painting to me_ , because that’s exactly what Phil would say. Phil would think that the person the lady in Automat was waiting for was just about to enter the frame, that L’Absinthe was two seconds away from being a reunion. Phil sees darkness in nothing. 

(Or he didn’t anyway. Dan wonders if Phil is a little more cynical now).

The thing is, he knows, would be stupid not to know, that there’s a chance Phil would take him back. Probably more than a chance. The whole point is that it can’t be like this, the same as it was before, with nothing changed or even attempted to be put right.

~*~

Dan leaves the the boxes in supply cupboard four. The three decoy parcels that he should be carrying to the boat but isn’t. Filled with some of Mark’s oldest, wiped, equipment (stripped of all prints and identifiable features). Notebooks documenting fabricated plans and codes, which Mark and Louise had a great time writing, outlines of a fake trade. The type of thing a really awful art thief would leave behind if he fucked a job up really badly. But then Dan isn’t an awful art thief, never has been, just a lazy one.

He puts on his balaclava and new sweatshirt, and the padding that Louise always makes him use, it looks natural and completely changes his build, gives him bigger shoulders. Makes it difficult for anyone to identify him.

~*~

Phil, at seven pm, had wandered into the shop and given Dan an incredibly tense look. “You’re working the late shift.”

Dan, fake casual, “yup. Zoe wanted to swap.”

They hadn’t spoken since Tuesday, the ill advised piano conversation day. This could, theoretically, be the last night he ever sees Phil, depending on what happens. 

Phil said “we’re the only two people in this side of the building.”

Dan said “are we.”

Phil frowned at him. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Everyone wanted to go to that night out so I swapped with Zoe and said I’ll go down later” Dan, for some reason, had done a really exaggerated shrug. “That’s all.”

Phil said “about Tuesday….” but then let his voice trail off, like he wanted to talk about it but had no idea what he actually wanted to say.

“I was a bit harsh, with what I said. I think I was in a weird mood.”

“I wasn’t” Phil said. “I meant it all.”

“I meant it too Phil, I just don’t think I explained it very well.”

Phil, still tense, still looking on edge, said “I know you’re leaving. I know something is happening tonight.”

Dan neither confirms or denies. 

“I’m not going to ask you to stay. I’d like you to, but I’m not going to ask.” 

Dan said “you basically just did.”

~*~

Dan swings out of supply cupboard four, along the wall, and straight into supply cupboard two. Louise had said, timing is key, it’s a rhythm, like a dance, even though both she and Dan know full well that he’s an awful dancer.

She’d corrected herself and said _it’s like playing the piano. Like sheet music. Wait for the rest_. The chirp, the rest, the beep, the chirp.

He takes the rest, then swings out of cupboard two across the hall into cupboard five. It’s really like an awful stealth level of Metal Gear Solid, the type that he was never good at because they stressed him out too much. 

He texts Louise _in sp 5 - all set up_

She replies _alarms and cameras off for ten mins again, can’t do more that that without it being obvious. It’s enough time for you to get to the painting. I’ll start the pauses then - TURN YOUR TIMER ON_

(he always forgot the timer, when they’d done this before)

(that had only been once, trying to get a Picasso. They don’t do many Picassos, Felix thinks it’s too obvious, being the most stolen artist of all time and everything, but for some reason he’d wanted to give Mediterranean Landscape to his mother as a really hard to explain gift. Dan hates Picasso, doesn’t like how loud and uncalming his paintings are, like a million things are screaming for your attention at once. 

They never got it anyway. He messed up the pauses completely and they ran into four other groups trying to steal the same thing. They’d all given PJ a sympathetic look for being stuck with Dan, who couldn’t even count the seconds between the frames.

PJ, on the way back through the air vents, said “don’t let them bother you Dan, you’re better than you think you are” because that had been when they were a team, when PJ would risk missing up the timings of their escape just to give Dan a confidence boost)

~*~

In front of Llama in Meadow. Awful in the most beautiful way. Clashing colours. The eyes not painted level. Mostly black and white with half finished flowers.

The background has both stars and the sun.

Dan gives it a fond little pat, on the top of its frame, and turns his timer on. 

It chirps, pause one, just as Phil enters the room, halfway through the circle, as he was expected to. He starts when he sees Dan, instinctively grabs for the radio at his belt and manages to drop it straight out of his hand.

Dan pulls up the balaclava, right over his head, and says “Phil.”

Phil, who never swears, says “you’re fucking kidding me.”

Dan says “wait, I have eight gaps for this. Each gap is thirty seconds.”

Phil says “what?”

“I’m putting this right. Act like you’re coming into the room again.” 

“I knew it was the llama, I -”

Dan says “it’s called The Ways In Which We Show Love Without Realising, Phil. Or I mean, it was. At one point.”

Phil stares at him. 

“I would have called it The Things We Do When We Love Someone, personally.”

Phil’s mouth is half open, like he’s waiting for the opportunity to speak, even though no one else is talking.

Beep. Dan says “that’s a five second warning, go to the door and come back in” he pulls the balaclava back down, not checking to see if Phil has understood.

On the chirp he’s got his hand positioned on the Llama’s frame, as though struggling to take it from the wall. He wouldn’t have struggled really, the thing is barely holding on. It would have been so easy to really steal.

Phil, coming back into the room, has exactly the right expression of shock.

~*~

_Phil says let me tell you from the start, from me. Please._

Phil first saw Dan in a tiny museum in Manchester, wearing a tag with a fake name, staring at Phil’s favourite painting like he could see something behind it. A painting that no one ever came to look at, in the smallest corner of the museum. His fringe was curling and he was smiling, a tiny upturn at the corner of his mouth, the kind of zoned out bliss that people get when they’re looking at something that they really love.

(in a bar a few weeks later Phil will say _you look like you do when you’re looking at the Van Gogh_ but Dan won’t be looking at the Van Gogh. He’ll be looking at Phil)

Phil had thought no wait stay. 

And then, later, oh my god I want to know everything about you, because being with Dan, loving Dan, was a beautiful slow reveal - like Phil was chasing him, chasing his smiles, the small revelations, straining to hear words that Dan would mumble under his breath, anticipating the times when Dan would forget himself.

Dan was always slightly out of reach, always that step ahead.

Until he wasn’t. Until Phil had caught him and finally, _finally_ , there he was. Dan. Exactly himself.

~*~

Chirp, and then the rest.

Phil says “what the hell are you doing? What _is_ this?”

“I’m putting it right, I told you,” Dan pulls the balaclava off again. His hair is going to be a state by the end.

“Like this?”

Dan takes the Llama off the wall, holds it carefully in front of him. Phil gasps and he says “no, this isn’t what’s happening.”

Phil says “I don’t understand.”

Dan says “I have eight gaps. Well, seven now. They’re thirty seconds each, pauses on the security cameras. When they unpause it shows us, doing whatever it is that we’re doing, it’s like short scenes all cut together.”

Phil says, slowly, “like editing.”

“Exactly. Like editing.”

“You want it to look like I’ve caught you?”

“You _are_ going to catch me.”

Phil shakes his head. “I don’t want to catch you.”

Dan says “trust me Phil.”

Phil says “don’t do anything stupid” not for the first time, but it’s not a no, so Dan gives him an encouraging little nod. 

“We need to be by the river exit by the end of the pauses, okay?”

“ _We_ do? Am I coming with you?” Phil, for a second, looks like he hopes that’s the case, like he and Dan are going to run off into the red tipped London sky, stolen painting in hand.

(maybe, in a different life).

Dan repeats “river exit, end of the pauses.”

Phil says “okay” instantly, completely trusting.

~*~

Phil had wanted so badly for Dan to be happy. He couldn’t understand why Dan wasn’t. He had no idea why Dan always looked at him like Phil was going to be snatched away at any moment, why there was always a tiny frown between his eyebrows. Why he startled anytime someone said his name.

That frown had reduced the more time that they spent together, Phil takes a lot of pride in that. Towards the end it had almost disappeared completely.

He told Chris “I think that cute cleaner at work is actively avoiding me.”

Chris said “you mean the one that you terrified at the Van Gogh?”

“I didn’t terrify him. I mean, I think I _did_ but I didn’t mean to.”

Dan was always at the Van Gogh, staring. The second time he saw Phil was not the second time that Phil saw Dan, it was more like the thirtieth. Phil had watched him from across the gallery, over tourists’ heads, for days, memorised the swoop of his hair, the way his face always softened when school trips came in. 

How he did a lot of mopping but very little actual cleaning. How he never spoke to anyone else, to the point that none of Phil’s colleagues even knew who he was, like he was deliberately trying not to be noticed. But Phil had noticed. 

When Dan said _I like how lonely the boats look_ , the only thing he noticed in that beautiful painting, Phil thought _oh my gosh please let me make you happy, please_.

~*~

They leave the room for the next one; Dan has the llama under his arm. They’re running but with exactly ten strides between them. It’s like sitting next to Phil on a bench, standing next to Phil on the Tube, a careful distance between them that Phil doesn’t jump over, ever.

When the timer chirps Phil speeds up, grabs Dan’s shoulder, pulls off the balaclava. “What do you mean catch you? Like, you’re still going to be here when the police get here? Is that the plan?”

“No, I mean you’re going to _catch_ me. For once.”

“You’re talking backwards, I don’t understand.”

Dan leans in, presses their foreheads together, “think about what I said?”

“About putting it right? This is putting it right?” Phil looks increasingly frustrated. He pulls back. “Just tell me, I don’t get it”

“ _Think_ Phil. How would I put it right?”

“You’d quit. That’s what you said. You asked what would happen if you quit” Phil shakes his head. “This is a pretty dramatic way to quit.”

The timer beeps.

~*~

In Starbucks in Manchester, having got completely soaked in the rain because neither of them were wearing coats, raindrops falling from Phil’s fringe onto his cheeks. He didn’t care, didn’t even notice, was having to pinch himself that Dan was even there, sitting with him.

Dan used to look at Phil like he was scared to, like someone was going to challenge him. Through his eyelashes, under his fringe, over his shoulder. Glances that Phil always caught, even when Dan was trying hard to be secretive.

The thing is that Dan’s pretty obvious, even if he likes to think he isn’t. 

Phil ordered a caramel macchiato and the world’s largest muffin, and had promptly split half the coffee over himself as he sat down. Dan, looking up, shot him a look of such fondness that Phil had wanted to spill the other half.

Phil said “sorry. I’m ridiculously clumsy. You probably haven’t noticed yet."

Dan said “I’ve noticed” and instantly flushed and looked away.

~*~

On the fourth one they fake a struggle - Phil pulling the llama out of Dan’s hands and pushing him. Dan stumbles and is losing his balance on the chirp when Phil catches his waist with one arm, steadying him.

Phil doesn’t let go, even though he could. He turns Dan a little, to face him. “This is stupid Dan, this is so stupid. I _told_ you not to do anything stupid.”

Balaclava off again, which is getting slightly irritating. Dan doesn’t bother to tidy his hair, leaves his fringe standing in a peak. “I hate the way the other security guards speak to you. I hate the way that you just brush it off.”

Phil smoothes his fringe down. “It doesn’t _matter_.”

“I hate that you forgive so easily Phil, you should make people fight for you more.”

Phi blinks, eyes big, so much blue, shakes his head, “you’re annoyed that I’ve forgiven you?”

“Not annoyed. I just -”

“You think I should punish you more? That’s messed up Dan.”

~*~

Phil smiled and said, firmly, “and I don’t want to be anywhere that you’re not” because he didn’t, he never did.

Dan smiled at him, slightly unsure, like he wasn’t sure if he entirely deserved it. 

Phil didn’t like that look. He reached out and smoothed the frown away from Dan’s eyebrows. “Why are you frowning? It’s a nice thing to say, isn’t it?” - light tone, not giving away the insecurities underneath.

Dan said “I have no idea what I did to deserve you. Look at you.”

Phil blinked. He had awful bedhead and was wearing his spare glasses, the ones that are on a slant and don’t even match his right prescription anymore. Even in the blur Dan was the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. “Is that sarcasm?”

~*~

On the fifth Dan has the painting back, like there was a struggle on the gap in-between. He runs and Phil, as planned, trips him. He falls, turning to hold the painting safely above him, lands right on the chirp, flat on his back.

“I knew what the painting used to be called. _I’m_ the one who told _you_ ,” Phil says.

“What did you even mean by that?” Dan, on the floor, looking up. “Why do we talk to each other in metaphors all the time?”

Phil, above, looking down at him, “I don’t know. And I _don’t_. You’re the one who does that.”

Dan says “unfair” then “maybe we should scuffle on the floor for the next one.”

Phil raises an eyebrow.

“Not like that.”

“You didn’t plan these out?” says Phil. 

The scuffle is half hearted but hopefully looks okay on camera. When the timer chirps Phil lets out a huge exhale and collapses over Dan’s chest.

~*~

In his flat, watching Dan like he was a hallucination.

Dan had mentioned about the paintings being rescued and Phil thought _but who rescues you? Who looks out for you?_

He was already halfway back in love with Dan by that point, had been since the picnic benches, weeks ago, when Dan had said I’ll be okay, I’m always okay, and Phil had wanted to say, but you’re _not_. And when Dan had said _is it fixable? Is there a chance?_ Phil had wanted to say that there always was, there always had been, but couldn’t do it, couldn’t release the words from his heart into his mouth.

Dan said _if I was just me would there be a chance?_ like being just him was some sort of punishment, like he was sorry for being Dan instead of Dylan. Not realising that him being just Dan was everything Phil had ever wanted.

~*~

After the scuffle, Phil says, into the scratchy knit of Dan’s ugly padded jumper, sprawled across Dan’s chest, “this seems a bit extreme just to stop people from being mean to me.”

“That’s not what it’s about. Not completely anyway.”

“That part of it never bothered me that much. It’s only work and it was never permanent. It’s not like I see them outside the gallery anyway. The other part was worse,” Phil sighs, Dan feels it through the material. “What do I say to the police?”

“Exactly this. You caught someone, you chased them. You got the painting. It’s not even a lie, really.”

Phil moves slightly, presses his forehead to Dan’s shoulder. “And you get away? Right? Because I’m going to let you get away.”

“There’s no basement to let me out of.”

“I would. I’d let you out of all the basements. Every single time.”

Dan says “that’s somehow the nicest thing that anyone’s ever said to me” weakly and Phil, unexpectedly, tilts his head up to kiss the underside of Dan’s chin (featherlight, like a raindrop)

~*~

Phil said “seeing you is difficult. I’ll stay out of your way from now on” but he hadn’t because it was impossible to. He could never stay away from Dan. He changed shifts to stand near the gift shop, he went to the quiet picnic benches every day, he worked out the quietest times for the piano exhibition, he dropped hints to Finn over and over.

He’d expected so many differences. For Dylan to have been an act. For Dan’s voice to be different, his mannerisms, his walk, everything. But he wasn’t. He was exactly the same. Except he looked tired. Even more sad. 

Phil wanted to reach out again, all the time, every time, to smooth the frown in Dan’s eyebrows.

~*~

Phil shakes his head. Dan reaches out, touches his face; thumb on his cheekbone, fingertips at his temples. He says “stop thinking.”

Phil says “Dan, you don’t have to do this. I don’t need some huge gesture to believe that you’re sorry. I know that you are.”

“It’s not about just being sorry Phil. It’s about putting it right.”

“But then what? What happens next?”

“That’s your call. I thought it was time that I waited for you for a change.”

“I meant to you. You wrecked your job. What happens then?” 

The timer beeps, five second warning. Dan pushes the llama into Phil’s hands.

When the timer chirps to say the security cameras are back up he’s running down the corridor towards the ticket hall, Phil chasing him. It probably looks pretty convincing.

~*~

He’d kept the photos really as proof that Dan had existed. That he’d been a real person who had loved Phil. He told all his friends that Dylan had gone back home, suddenly, but would come back. At some point.

Chris had said “hmmmm” in a tone that clearly indicated that he didn’t believe him but was prepared to pretend he did. 

Phil replayed every conversation they ever had, every interaction, for any sign that it hadn’t been real, but he couldn’t find any. Some things made more sense but the majority were exactly what they’d been. Real. 

That made it worse that Dan didn’t come back.

~*~

The timer beeps again. Dan stops and turns, holds his arms out, catches Phil as momentum carries him into them.

Dan, in the midst of balaclava removal, says “this is the last thirty seconds.”

Phil says “oh? What do you want to do for this one?”

Dan kisses him, which is the only way he’d want to spend his last thirty seconds anywhere. The painting is crushed between them. He pulls at Phil’s shirt collar, deliberately, and Phil says _Dan_ against his mouth. Dan mumbles “I’ve waited months for you say my name, like that. That’s what I was whispering all the time.”

Phil says “that used to drive me crazy, that I couldn’t hear you, but -”

The timer goes. Dan says “this one’s the alarms” and breaks away. “You stay here, maybe look like you’ve tripped and that’s why -”

Phil says “Dan.”

Dan says “I love you. You don’t understand how much. I’ll wait. I’ll wait forever” and is running before the timer chirps.

~*~

Phil, really, if he’s honest, forgave Dan in the same way that he’d fallen in love with him.

Instantly (looking at a painting, walking through a door), with realisation following weeks later (standing in the rain, sitting at a picnic bench).

~*~

Dan’s out of the door and onto the grass when the alarms go, for once perfectly timed. He skids a little, nearly trips, hits the concrete and reaches the little jetty just as the lights come on, the entire Tate illuminated behind him.

There’s one boat, as expected, with one person, Tyler, who starts the engine as soon as Dan comes into view, pulling away from the shore as Dan jumps on board (pretty much when he’s in mid air); they’re in the middle of the river just as Dan hears approaching sirens.

PJ says “you’re crying.”

Dan says “am I?”, realises that he is, and says “PJ?”

PJ says “I thought it was best that Tyler wasn’t involved. I mean, once I worked out what you were doing. I brought you a change of clothes, I’m going to drop you near to where that work night out is, or as near as I can - Tyler’s going to pretend you’ve been there the whole time.” He gives Dan a considering look “it went as planned?”

“Is this so Tyler can stay?” Dan feels a warm rush of something, for PJ. Affection possibly.

“It’s so Tyler can stay and so that you get what you want. I know you don’t have a very high opinion of me, but -”

Dan says “that’s not true. You were right, I wasn’t being fair to you.”

PJ drops his head a little, curls bouncing around his face, “I worked it out as soon as the bugs disappeared. And all the stuff with Mark and Tyler. I knew you all had another plan. And I wondered why you hadn’t told me but then I realised it was obvious.”

Dan says “I thought that you’d tell Felix” because it’s the truth.

“Of course you did. I never made you think otherwise. And that didn’t exactly make me feel very good about myself. I watched that surveillance, in Manchester, I know how you used to look at each other.”

“We were pretty obvious.”

“You were. And then Tyler called me with some rubbish excuse about why we only needed one boat now and I _knew_. And then I remembered telling you that we’re friends and I couldn’t quite work out why I wasn’t helping you.”

Dan says “PJ.”

PJ shrugs and repeats “so it went as planned?”

“It did.”

“But you’re crying/”

“They’re happy tears. I think” he wipes at his eyes. “It went fine. He forgave me. I just -”

“Dan, I think he forgave you weeks ago/”

~*~

When Dan, in a new shirt and jeans, walks into the bar, Tyler yells “Liam! There you are!”

Zoe, next to him, says “is everything okay Liam? Ash said he saw you outside but you looked like you were having a pretty dramatic mobile conversation. You’ve been out there for ages. I wanted to come and speak to you -”

“I told her it looked a bit stressful,” Tyler interjects. “But it’s done now?” his tone is pointed enough for Zoe to pick up on it, raising her eyebrows.

Dan says “it’s done now.”

He doesn’t usually drink on jobs, it makes him forget his fake name and everyone else’s fake names too. But someone, Tyler probably, presses a bottle into his hand (which was shaking, apparently) and he accepts.

Tyler mumbles into his ear “I was on my way, but PJ was already there. I think he probably knew the whole time but he just let us carry on. I’ve already texted Mark.”

A little later, Dan is starting to feel antsy and awkward, a weird half drunk buzz, when he notices Finn on his phone, hand over one ear, intense look on his face. He freezes in place, prepares himself. 

Finn, over the noise, yells “guys! Something’s happened at work”, holds up his phone. “There was an attempted robbery.”

Everyone gasps, even Dan and Tyler (who goes a bit over the top with his, clasping his hands to his cheeks). There’s a shocked burst of silence.

“But it’s okay” Finn continues. “They’re saying that Phil stopped it.”

Security Guard 2 chokes on his pint and says “ _Lester_?” in a tone of such astonishment that Dan nearly laughs (he manages not to)

Finn, for his part, looks oddly proud. “Knew he had it in him. Stopped it by himself.”

Security Guard 2 repeats “Lester?”

~*~

He stays out for an appropriate length of time, then catches the tube home. He finds Louise standing out on the balcony of the flat, looking out, obviously waiting for him. She waves down to him in the street, all smiles. Dan, finally, smiles back, lets out a breath that he didn’t realise he was holding.

Louise is rushing back into the room as he lets himself in. She says “it really worked! Listen to the feed - one of the guys from the MET has been telling him how amazing he is for the past hour”.

She turns up the volume on Mark’s laptop to an extremely posh voice, undercut by alarms, saying “really well done, lad. Outstanding. Can’t believe you stopped it by yourself.”

Another posh voice says “Sir, we found where he must have been hiding. There’s some equipment and, I don’t know, some parcels? Three of them” there’s a thud of cardboard being placed on the floor. “Should we open them?”

They open the fake two first, Dan can tell, there’s a long pause after the third.

There’s a choked gasp noise, which can only be Phil.

Louise says “Dan, what did you do?”

The second voice says “fuck, that’s real, isn’t it?”

First voice says “looks like a Van Gogh, what the hell?”

Phil, voice trembling, but not in a sad way, “it’s a Van Gogh. It’s The Sea at Saintes Maries. It’s -” he sounds like he’s going to laugh or cry. Or somewhere in between, both at once.

Louise says “DAN”

Phil says “oh my _gosh_ ” which is the most Phil thing ever, with sudden realisation in his voice. “Oh my _God_.”

Louise says “Dan, you utter idiot” but she looks almost impressed. “Where did you even get it? Have you had it the whole time?”

There are small shuffling footsteps on the stream, then second voice says “better not touch it mate, we’ll need to dust it down.”

(it already had been, all fingerprints are gone. Mark saw to that)

First voice says “you’ve seen it before?”

Phil, trying to sound nonchalant, voice wavering, “a couple of times. Maybe.”

There’s a pause and then first voice says “fuck, you stopped a heist and found a Van Gogh. What a night.”

The stream cuts out, as Louise’s access to the Tate is finally severed. Keeping it open too long is risky. They both stare at the laptop screen in silence for a while.

“Well,” says Louise. Which is an understatement.

~*~

The BBC update comes through on his text alert at about three in the morning. Dan’s still up, pacing the room, unable to sleep. It says _Hero security guard stops Tate art heist and finds a lost Van Gogh in the process. More to follow_.

There are no calls or texts to the Manchester phone.

~*~

Mark on the balcony, surrounded by orange begonias, said “luck runs out sometimes.”

“I don’t mind if it does. I don’t mind if I get caught. It helps him. I stand there, in the shop, watching them, hearing how they speak to him. That’s because of me. His voice was wrong, at first, all flat and sad. That was because of me too. He deserves a clean slate.”

Mark said “so you give him all of that back? You have him stop a robbery instead of watch one? You return the Van Gogh? What are you trying to do? Erase yourself from his life? Because that’s pretty dramatic.”

Dan wanted to say well I’m a dramatic person, because he _is_ , let’s face it, but he said “I love him, Mark. He deserves a clean slate. He deserves everything.”

Mark, gently, said “I know. But what if he doesn’t come back?”

“I can deal with that” (he wouldn’t, not really. He would feel the absence of Phil from his life constantly, heart breaking over months, years, tiny pieces at a time). “If that’s what he would want. That’s all that matters.”

~*~

Phil, cross legged, beside him on a piano bench, flushed from having been talking for so long. “That’s my side. Of the story.”

Dan blinked and said “you only said the good parts.”

“And you keep focusing on the bad ones.”

~*~

There are no calls or texts to the Manchester phone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edward Hopper’s [Nighthawks](http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/citi/images/standard/WebLarge/WebImg_000254/187455_3026962.jpg)  
> Edward Hopper’s [Automat](http://www.edwardhopper.net/images/paintings/automat.jpg) (it really did have its first showing on Valentine’s Day. How sad)  
> Edgar Degas’ [L’Absinthe](https://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/degas/absinthe/degas.absinthe-2.jpg)  
> Van Gogh’s [Wheatfield with Crows](http://www.vggallery.com/painting/f_0779.jpg)  
> Pablo Picasso’s [Mediterranean Landscape](http://www.pablopicasso.org/images/paintings/mediterranean-landscape.jpg) (because I had to include the most stolen artist of all time)
> 
> (and also a piano version of [the closing credit music to Pokemon Ruby](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4VZgQiKbns) which is oddly emotional, to me)
> 
> In a rare true fact about the Tate in this fic, they really did have an exhibition called The Pleasures of Sadness.


	7. Chapter 7

_Dan, I think you could probably find a better place for this than I could. It’s yours. I hope the memories aren’t all bad ones._  


The best place, of course, was obvious. Always had been. When the parcel arrived, one month after he did, at the Camden flat, he’d dreamt about breaking back into the Manchester gallery, hanging it on the wall (where, in his imagination, there is a huge blank space, just waiting for The Sea at Saintes Maries to come back)

(Isn’t everyone just waiting for someone, something, to come back?)

He could have hung it up and left it there, exactly where it should be. Phil would, obviously, have known it was him. It could be his own version of a tug on a shirt collar. 

(Thinking on it Dan doesn’t know why he ever told Phil to tone it down. He won’t do that next time, if there is a next time. He’ll shout from every roof top, jump for every blown kiss, there’d be no such thing as too obvious)

~*~

Mark says “well you did it, you put it right.”

Dan, still staring at the Manchester phone, says “yes”, only half paying attention. 

Mark says “give him a chance, it’s only been one night. He’s probably been with the police for most of it.”

“And he’s probably still trying to process it” Louise adds, in the middle of packing her suitcase. “He did have a pretty eventful evening, Dan. For want of a better word.”

Dan says “I’ll phone him” decisively and starts to tap at the screen. 

Mark says “doesn’t that defeat the whole point? The ‘on Phil’s terms only’ point?” 

Dan hesitates. 

“You can’t do that and then phone him like _hey what’s up_ ” says Louise. “Let him come to you.”

~*~

Louise leaves on Friday evening, unable to stay any longer and refusing to let him go with her to Paddington. It usually gets emotional, with him and Louise, lots of wailing and clinging (mostly from her, a little from him).

Dan walks her as far as the Tube, carries her suitcase down the steps. She says “be patient Dan. Just give him a bit of time.”

“What if he doesn’t come back though?” Dan takes the Manchester phone everywhere. He’d _slept_ with the Manchester phone the night before. “What if he’s thought about it and decided that I’m too much?”

“Too much of what?”

“Of _everything_. Too much of me.”

“He loved you when you were yourself before, didn’t he?”

Dan says “maybe” and Louise rolls her eyes. “I mean, he did. I know he did.”

“Then what’s changed?”

“ _Why_ hasn’t he phoned?”

Louise reaches out and grabs his shoulder, stops him from the pacing that he was apparently doing, up and down the platform. “He will Dan. All the signs say he will. Just stop worrying. If anything, you should be worrying about what to tell Felix.”

“I’m going to tell him the truth. I’m telling everyone the truth now.”

Louise looks like a mixture of proud and maternal, cups his chin in her hand. “Take care of yourself Dan Howell.”

“I will. And thank you. For helping.” 

“You’re welcome. And I’ll always help, you know that” she pats his cheek. “Now go before the train comes please, don’t do the usual creepy thing you always do.”

The creepy thing he always does (apparently) is stand on the platform and stare at Louise, mournfully, through the train window during the awkward pause before it pulls away, while she pretends that she doesn’t know him. He says “I won’t.”

But he does anyway.

~*~

Dan had been a little arrogant, maybe. He’d assumed that Phil would instantly phone him, that it would be the very first thing he did, after the police were out of the way.

Mark, on Saturday morning, trying to take the phone from his hands. “Leave that here. Seriously. I can’t take it. Put it back with the other ones.”

He thinks that he should have said more, in that piano conversation. He should have said more in _all_ their conversations. Phil wanted to make him happy. He should have said _I_ could make you happy too. We could make each other happy, surely. You’re the only person who’s ever made me feel like I would be capable of that, of making someone else happy.

Mark says “Dan, give me the phone.”

But then maybe Phil had decided it was just all too much, too dramatic. Maybe Dan just wasn’t worth the hassle. Maybe he really had accidentally edited himself out. Maybe the Van Gogh had been a bad idea, had taken it too far. 

“Dan, the phone. Please.”

But no. _I’d let you out of all the basements. Always_. 

Mark finally manages to wrestle the phone out of his hand and pockets it. “I’m doing this for your own good.”

Dan says “Mark, why isn’t he coming back?”

Mark has said _give him a chance_ and _maybe he needs time_ a lot over the past two days. He doesn’t say anything now, just gives Dan a sad look.

Dan had said _I’ll wait, I’ll wait forever_ and he’d fully intended to, but maybe he would have rethought it, if he’d realised how hard two days would be. If two days is this need, the pull at his heart that isn’t going away, then what is forever going to feel like?

Mark says “I’m putting this away. You can have it back tomorrow”

It’s not lost on him that this is probably how Phil felt, back in Manchester. That he probably deserves to wait, at least for a little while.

~*~

He gets called in for questioning, which he’d been expecting just from being the one on the late shift, but there’s really nothing to answer. Everything adds up. The three boxes he and Finn had taken to main storage are still there, full with books to replace the stolen ones, which makes perfect sense; his visitor’s pass shows him leaving the building at 9:06, completely as normal, and then he went to the staff night out, was seen by multiple people.

The police officer interviewing him is young and pretty, and completely caves under his dimples, easily led into a casual conversation once the interview is over. She says that, between you and me, they think it was a pretty shoddy job and that the Van Gogh was there as some kind of trade for later, judging by the notebooks. “The idiot just forgot to go back for it”

Dan says “yeah, what an idiot” then “hey, how’s that security guard? I can’t remember his name. The one who -”

“Oh, _him_. He’s fine, he’s been back and forth here since Thursday. He kept going on about the Van Gogh more than the actual robbery, wanting us to _understand_ the thief more. I mean, who cares about that? He said we should ease off on them. Weird.”

Dan repeats “weird.”

When she asks for a contact number and address he politely declines because “I’m going travelling for a few months, from tomorrow. I won’t be available”, which she accepts, even if she does look a bit disappointed. 

He hangs around outside the station for a bit too long, for a sight of Phil, a glimpse would be enough. But there’s nothing.

~*~

He texts Tyler to ask if Phil has been back at work.

Tyler says _no but evry1 tlking abt hm hv u hrd frm hm?_ which reminds Dan why he prefers to actually speak to Tyler in person. 

Tyler replies again about twenty minute later to say _finn says hes nt cming bck goin strght to plcment?_

That helps. Dan could totally research every single film company in London, get PJ to hack their employee records. He could absolutely do that. 

Tyler, as though reading his thoughts, adds _dnt trce let hm cm to u_

Dan is reminded of being sat on a picnic bench clinging to Phil’s sleeve, not wanting him to leave. Wanting him to stay.

~*~

When he gets back to the flat the first thing he notices is that the Steinway isn’t there anymore, there’s just a huge expanse of space where it had been. The Monet is missing too, and all of the little figurines and sculptures. Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth isn’t in the hall.

Dan immediately assumes that they’ve been robbed, just in a really neat and tidy way, until he walks further into the room and realises that all the (antique French Heritage) furniture has gone, cheaper looking replacements where they used to be.

He’s about to say _sorry I’m in the wrong flat_ when someone with a Swedish accent says “sorry to drop in like this Daniel.”

Felix is sat in the middle of the room, on a new, very plain, grey Ikea sofa. Dressed in varying shades of plum, which is a bold choice that he just about carries off. Now that Dan really concentrates it looks like Ikea basically threw up over the place. 

Dan says “uh.”

Felix says “Daniel, did I ever tell you how Marzia and I met?”

Dan blinks “no.”

“I’m not going to.”

“Okay? Uh, what happened to the -”

“Because she told me to tell you. Because it’s _relevant_ apparently. And maybe it is. Maybe it’s super fucking relevant and hearing it would make you feel better or some shit. That’s what she said, anyway. But on the way over here I was like, actually no, I don’t want to tell Dan about that. I don’t want him to know. It’s between me and her, just us. Do you get what I’m trying to say?”

“Maybe?”

Felix sighs. “I wasn’t…… I was a dick to you. I know that now. It wasn’t intentional. It never is. Marzia says I have no filter. I shouldn’t have sent you that painting, it was messed up, I know. I didn’t see it that way, I thought -”

Dan says “what happened to the flat?”

Felix says “Daniel, I’m still talking. I didn’t see it that way. I thought I was giving you something that meant…..whatever to you. Not, like, the symbol of what happened. When I heard he was at the Tate Marzia was like, wow, you should totally -”

Dan says, slower, “what happened to the flat?”

“I’ve had it cleaned. For you. I know it’s your favourite. I’m giving it to you. All traces of me are completely gone, the art, the sculptures, the phones, the laptops, the bugs, all the equipment and stuff.”

Dan is aware that his mouth has fallen open. “I don’t -”

“I meant what I said. This and the money, it’s yours. I’m cutting you loose. I should have done it after Manchester. I’ll never contact you again.”

Dan says “you can’t be serious.”

“For once, I am” Felix shrugs. “I have a conscience Dan, sometimes. I didn’t feel good about what happened to you. The Marzia story is relevant there but also none of your business, so - I knew he was at the Tate. I wanted you to see he was okay but I guess I should have known what would happen.”

Dan says “sorry. About the llama.”

“It was a pretty awesome painting” Felix says, dreamily. “But there’ll be other awesome paintings, who cares?”. He stands up, completely over the whole conversation, “I’ve left the keys for you. I changed the locks and everything. The only thing I left is the balcony garden.”

“The garden?”

“The flowerpots and shit, whatever” Felix starts looking distracted, as he usually does when talking has gone on for too long. “He likes plants, doesn’t he?”

Dan nearly says _how did you know that_ but it’s not like Felix would tell him anyway. He says “you don’t have to never contact me again.”

Felix laughs. “Maybe I will, from time to time. Nothing major.” He picks up his purple scarf. “Thank you for, uh, your… I can’t think of the right word. Service?”

Dan can’t say you’re welcome so he says “that’s okay. I liked it some of the time.”

“Marzia wanted me to leave you the piano but I thought….” Felix looks at the empty space where the Steinway had once been. “That you’d probably want rid of everything that’s….”

“Stolen?”

Felix looks outraged. “Daniel, how many times? I don’t steal things, I -”

“Rescue them”

Felix winks at him. “That’s right.”

Dan walks him to the door, still in something of a daze, and he misses it when Felix says “hey, your boy’s on the news tonight, I hear.”

Mark, coming up the stairs, freezes in place at the sight of them.

Felix says “Mark”, voice smooth as silk, then “Dan, I said your boy’s on the news tonight. You should watch it.” To Mark he says “thanks for your work on this one. I’ll transfer as normal.”

Mark says “but I didn’t -” but decides not to argue any further.

Felix says “later bitches” to them both, flings his scarf over his shoulder, and is gone.

Dan has to pause for a second as does Mark. Felix tends to leave an odd flat atmosphere when he’s vacated a room, like everyone is wondering what the hell just happened. The dull pause after a firework display.

Mark, eventually going into the flat, says “what the hell? This is our flat right?”

Dan says “it’s mine. It’s my flat” and has to go and stand in his bedroom for while in case he cries. 

(Felix, weeks ago, in green and gold, saying a house of your own, that’s what you’ve earnt, but maybe he’s remembering it backwards. There’s been too much to keep track of)

Mark knocks gently on the door, says “did he say that Phil’s on the news? Tonight?”

Dan says “I don’t know if I can watch it” but he and Mark both know that there’s no way that he won’t.

~*~

There’s a brief recap first. Zoom in on the painting, outside shots of the Tate. The voiceover, in a flat monotone, explains that that it is expected that the thief hid in a supply cupboard where the rest of his belongings were found. He nearly escaped with Llama in Meadow if not for the actions of a very brave security guard.

One of the MET police officers says “we think this was a very inexperienced thief. The whole thing was very rushed and haphazard. To leave your plans and another painting behind is almost unheard of.”

Mark snorts a laugh, but stops when the tv cuts to a blonde reporter, somewhere on the South Bank. Obviously filmed earlier as it’s still light. She says _I’m here with_ and Dan holds his breath to see:

Phil, looking incredibly awkward in his owl jumper, obviously hating every moment. His hair is neat, brushed off his face. The very sight of him is a tug on Dan’s heart.

Mark says “that’s him!”

Dan confirms “that’s him” in a choked voice, like he and Phil have been apart for years, not days.

The interviewer, who is 90% blonde highlights, says “so, Phil, the Tate have referred to you as a hero, and Brigitta Palmarsdottir sent you a personal thank you for stopping the attempted robbery of her painting. How does that make you feel?”

Phil, rapidly blinking and looking everywhere except the camera, says “a bit uncomfortable really. I don’t feel like I did much, other than chase him out of the door”. His voice is extra Northern. 

“But that was very brave.”

Phil grimaces. “I guess. I mean, I’m glad the painting’s safe, but -”

The interviewer nods encouragingly but Phil’s trailed off voice doesn’t come back. He gives her a slightly desperate look. 

The interviewer says “I hear that you turned down the reward money?”

Phil says “yes.”

“But asked for something from the museum instead?”

“Yes” Phil looks right down the lense, for a change. “I asked for a piano.”

Dan makes an odd gasping squeak noise, almost a hiccup. Mark looks startled.

The interviewer says something, who knows what, and Phil reaches up and pulls on his shirt collar. 

Dan spills his coffee over himself. He gasps again.

Mark smacks his back, like he’s choking. “What was that? What did that mean?”

“What?”

“The collar thing?”

The tv has cut back to an outside view of the Tate, with the monotone voice back, then to a girl with white blonde hair, who can only be Brigitta Palmarsdottir herself.

“It means” Dan finally catches his breath. “It means I love you and I wish I could tell you.”

“You made a _signal_?” Mark says. “I mean, of course you did. Of course you made a signal.”

“Of course we did” Dan agrees. “He came up with it. I -”

“And I think he might have gotten you a piano.”

Dan says “the phone, where’s my phone? The Manchester phone?”

Mark says “I’ll get it, I’ll just - stay here.”

He’s gone a long time. Dan can hear rummaging, things being moved and thrown around. He also hears Phil, _I asked for a piano_ , _I’ll buy you one. With my first editing paycheck_.

Mark comes back into the room and says “Dan” in an oddly formal way, and Dan knows the rest of what he’s going to say before it happens.

~*~

Dan isn’t sure how he missed it, the _all traces of me gone_ extending beyond the basic stolen artwork and antique furnishings. Maybe he wasn’t listening properly. He hears Felix’s voice echoing, the laptops, the bugs.

The phones. All the phones are gone. The only one he has is his normal one, in his pocket. Which Phil doesn’t have the number to and doesn’t have Phil’s number in it. _Why_ didn’t he put Phil’s number in his actual phone?

“I thought that was tempting fate” he says, hysterically. “Putting him into my real phone. My _real_.... What should I do?”

Mark, wringing his hands, says “his flat? You know where his flat is, right? They filmed that earlier, it looks like. He could be there.”

~*~

Phil’s flat is in darkness. Dan stares at it from the street for a while and then follows another resident into the building when they let themselves in.

He knocks Phil’s door about twenty times, eventually gives up and slumps forward, leans his forehead against it. He rummages in his pocket for some notepaper, as Mark had yelled _leave him a message_ as he’d run out of the flat, but there’s nowhere to put any note, no space under the door.

The building’s shared mailbox doesn’t look that secure, and it doesn’t look like Phil’s checked his little section in ages. Dan leaves a note with his phone number anyway, writes _it’s me, please phone. I saw you on the news_ , tries to make his handwriting readable. 

He could write a billion other things, a whole novel, but doesn’t.

~*~

Mark leaves on a Wednesday, almost one week after the llama job. He’s unsure about going but he has plans, Dan knows. He doesn’t expect people to wait around for Phil to come back, that’s Dan’s issue. He tells Mark so.

Mark says “I know, but - you’ll Skype me, right? You’ll let me know as soon as anything happens.”

Dan goes all the way to the airport with him, even though he’s awful with goodbyes. He’d had a flashback of Mark, weeks ago, saying _no one ever asks for me_ , an imagined memory of Mark being chased down a street in LA, stealing a Jose Bernal. Putting things right for Dan because he couldn’t do it for himself. 

Mark, giant labrador puppy of a human that he is, gets teary before they’ve even gotten into the terminal. “I know I wasn’t your first choice for this job, Dan, but -”

“Maybe you weren’t, but you will be from now on.”

“This was your last job” Mark points out. 

Dan says “I know.”

Mark looks confused and says “that makes no sense” but he hugs him anyway, a great bear hug that Dan never wants to leave. He buries his face in the softness of Mark’s sweatshirt, and closes his eyes for a second. 

When Mark releases him he says “where will you go? LA?”

Mark says “Not all of these stories can have happy endings” in a dry tone and shifts his carry-on bag over his shoulder. “Back to Ohio probably, try to decide what to do next. Who knows?”. He claps a hand to Dan’s shoulder, nearly knocks him off his feet, “take care of yourself. Be happy and stuff.”

He’s walked through security before Dan realises he hasn’t replied. He runs right up to the start of the line, to the point where the guards give him odd looks, and yells “thank you!” so loudly that the whole of Heathrow can probably hear him.

Mark spins around and smiles at him. It looks like he says “no problem.”

Dan shouts “thank you. I mean it” again.

Mark flushes and gives him a wave, one slow arch of his hand. He turns and instantly gets swallowed up by the crowd.

Dan waves back even though Mark can’t even see him anymore.

~*~

Phil’s flat is empty on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. His mail is untouched, Dan’s note still sat, neatly folded, on top of the piles of letters.

On Friday, in desperation, he goes back to the Tate. Even though returning to the scene of an almost crime is a pretty awful idea. 

Tyler, in his ticket booth, sees him and raises his eyebrows. 

His name badge says Tyler, which makes Dan smile for the first time in days.

He keeps letting people cut the line in front of him until Tyler’s booth is free. 

Tyler says “I said what you said. That it was my middle name and I wanted to go by my first again. No one even questioned it.”

Dan says “you’re staying, here?”

“I like it” says Tyler. “I could do it forever, like I said”. He leans forward. “Mark told me about the flat, that’s great, Dan, I -”

The flat is still overwhelming, the fact that it belongs to him. That it’s his home. With Mark not there it all seems a bit too much. He says “and you. And your normal job, your -”

“Normal life?” Tyler smiles at him. “I know, check us out. Normals.” His smile fades completely when he asks “and you still haven’t heard from him?”

Dan says “nothing, He hasn’t been back here?”

“No, like I said, Finn just knows that he’s starting his placement soon. He didn’t know what company. I could try and find out for you.”

Dan wants to say yes but, again, that defeats the point. He says “no, I made it clear to him. About who was doing the waiting this time.”

“Maybe you said that without realising how long you’d actually be able to wait” Tyler replies. “You’re not the most patient person.”

~*~

PJ phones him on behalf of a friend who owns a bar and needs a pianist to give the place “some ambience” in the evenings. PJ says “it’s for the theatre audience, you know, people on their way to the West End and that. Play a lot of showtunes.”

Dan says “playing the piano? Seriously?”

PJ says “yeah, you play, right?”

Dan says “as a _job_?”

“Dan, is this a yes or a no? The money Felix gave you isn’t going to last forever.”

(not forever, but for a few years, at least. That’s even with some left over for holidays).

Dan takes the job and also accepts the leaflets that PJ drops off about music courses in various universities. 

PJ says “he hasn’t come back yet?” gently.

“You’re all saying _yet_ like it’s obvious that he’s going to. At some point.”

“I’m sure he -”

“It’s been two weeks” Dan points out. 

“That’s not long, Dan. It’s not forever.”

It feels like it is.

~*~

Phil’s flat is empty for the entire following week. And the week after. The neighbours start giving him odd looks. Phil’s mail overflows, his note is no longer there. Obviously tumbled out and thrown away.

Dan decides not to keep checking. He can take a hint, eventually.

~*~

He phones his mother to tell her that he has a job and a flat. She tries not to sound suspicious about how he’s affording a flat in Camden but sounds genuinely proud about the job part. When he says it’s playing the piano she says “oh _Dan_.”

On his first night he fills out his employee details with his real name. For the first time ever. His colleagues call him Dan. He speaks to them and says actual real facts about himself. He wears a little gilt edged badge with Daniel on it. 

He tells his mother “it’s going okay. They like me, I think.”

She says “well, why wouldn’t they?” in a confused way. 

“I have a badge with my name on it.”

His mother crosses the line from confused into baffled. “Who else’s name would it be?”

There are mirrors right in front of the piano, he catches sight of himself sometimes, in the midst of playing, an expression on his face that it takes him a while to recognise as contentment. 

He thinks _that’s me_ and hears an answering voice, from far away, agree. _That’s you_.

~*~

The lack of Phil becomes a sad, dull ache that he feels right down to his bones. He sees someone on the tube in a coat that Phil owns, someone who is the same build and has similar hair, and he follows them all the way to Oxford Circus before he realises that it isn’t Phil. He plays music that Phil likes, as he’s going to hear it, from wherever he is, like a homing signal. A siren call.

“Maybe” Louise says, slowly, like she really doesn’t want to say it. “Maybe he left. That’s why the flat was empty. Maybe he moved.”

Dan says “but the shirt collar. The piano.”

“Maybe they’re goodbyes Dan, maybe that was a goodbye.”

It’s something Phil would do. He hates confrontation, having to say things he doesn’t want to say, making people unhappy. Maybe he drew his own line under it, put it right himself and then left.

~*~

PJ comes to the bar, sits and cheerfully fingertaps along to everything Dan plays. When Dan joins him, on his break, he says “I’m coming to say goodbye, I’m going to Boston for a job.”

PJ will never leave, a normal life does not appeal. But that’s okay. Dan says “you’re coming back to London though?”

“Sure, I’ll text you,” PJ looks like he wants to hug him but just pats his shoulder instead. “You did good Dan, I’m glad that you got what you wanted.”

Dan says “most of it.”

“That will come later, I’m sure,” PJ gives up on being casual and hugs him. “I’ll see you soon. I promise.”

Dan says “thank you.”

~*~

Two weeks turn into three, and then four. It may as well be years, for how much Dan feels it, in his heart. The small shatters, the tiny splinters under his skin.

They have request nights, on Thursdays, customers can come up and leave little notes on the piano, for what they want him to play next. Or sometimes leave their phone numbers, as has happened more than once. Dan throws those ones away.

He gets more notes than the last pianist used to get, apparently. The other pianist probably didn’t get as many telling him to _smile more_ but, there you go.

~*~

A Wednesday. Dan looks up before starting, doing a usual survey of the place, trying to gage the audience and what they might like. It’s mostly older ladies, and so he creates a suitable playlist in his head. A lot of older stuff, ballads and such. He’s meant to introduce himself but he never does, never really knows what to say beyond _hi, I’m Dan_.

He’s halfway through the fourth song when he glances at the bar, just casually, and sees:

Phil.

~*~

An echo of Phil, beside a painting, smiling and saying “found you at last. You’re a difficult person to try and catch up with”

~*~

Phil. Phil across the bar, finding him through a crowd, a city, a _world_ of people. Like Dan is everything he has ever been searching for. Dan, abruptly hitting a D flat in the middle of People, making everyone jump. Phil, with an obnoxiously blue drink in hand, staring at Dan like he’s seeing him across an entire lifetime.

There you are. Found you at last. 

Dan uses his microphone for once and says “sorry, small technical difficulty, I -” and doesn’t care enough to finish the sentence.

He sprints through the restaurant area, banging his hips into every table possible, nearly falls in any number of laps, and trips when he gets to Phil, falls straight into him. Phil catches him by the arms. 

Phil says “ _Dan_. I found you. I’ve been looking for _ages_.”

Dan says “ _Phil_. You found me” and kisses him. His forehead, both cheeks, his chin, the corner of his mouth, the space under his ear.

Phil pulls back, makes eye contact, and says “ _Dan_ ” again.

“I thought you’d gone.”

“I thought you’d gone. I went back to my parents but I was phoning and phoning and there was no answer.”

“My phone got thrown out. Long story.”

“You saw me? On the news? I was hoping you would.”

“Yes, I came straight to your flat but -”

“I didn’t want to leave so quickly but my mum was having a meltdown. I went straight after the interview” Phil brushes Dan’s fringe from his face. “I had to stay there, my entire family was freaking out, and they just wouldn’t let me _leave_. I couldn’t reach you and I had no idea how to.”

“I came to your flat. Loads. But I stopped about two weeks ago because I thought -”

Phil says “that’s when I came back. We missed each other. I didn’t know what to think but then I….”

“I thought you’d gone” Dan repeats.

“I didn’t look for you before. But I knew I could find you this time” Phil leans forward, presses their foreheads together, touches his hand to Dan’s collar. “I knew you wouldn’t have left, I _knew_. But I worked it out. I had a feeling. I’ve been to every piano related bar in London. And there’s a lot.”

Dan runs his hand over Phil’s collar and says “come home with me.”

Phil blinks. “Home with you?”

“Yes, to my actual home. I have one of those now.”

Phil, reluctantly, says “isn’t this your job? You can’t just leave.”

“I suppose. Wouldn’t look great” he kisses Phil again, on his cheekbone, right under his eye. “It’s my job. I have an actual normal job now too. Stay here?”

Phil kisses him back, in exactly the same place. “I’m not going anywhere. Take as long as you like.”

~*~

He manages to get through his playlist, at an incredible speed. The audience seem to like it though, especially one person in particular who gives standing ovations from the bar and goes through a lot of candy coloured drinks.

Dan barely acknowledges that anyone else is in the room. In the street. In the whole of London. When he finishes he doesn’t even go to the staffroom to get his non work clothes, he walks straight to Phil, through all the tables, and says “come home with me.”

Phil says “yes” like he’s answering a far bigger question.

~*~

Outside Phil suddenly turns to him and holds his hand out.

Dan takes it instantly.

Phil says “hi, I’m Phil. I’m a recently ex-security guard who stopped an art heist and found a Van Gogh. You probably saw it on the news. I’m just about to start an internship. I eat too much sugar and I can’t keep houseplants alive.”

Dan laughs a half laugh, half sob “seriously?”

Phil squeezes his hand, looks expectant.

“I’m Dan. I dropped out of Law and did other stuff for a bit. But I don’t anymore. Now I play the piano. I, uh, wear a lot of black and I’m really awkward most of the time.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Dan. For the first time ever” Phil smiles. “Let’s never talk about that other stuff you used to do ever again.”

On the tube they share a safety rail and Phil covers Dan’s hand with his own, arm around Dan’s back, deliberately bumps into him with every movement of the train. Dan is smiling so much that he almost doesn’t recognise himself in his reflection (almost doesn’t. That’s him. That’s what he looks like).

~*~

He’s emptied his tiny suitcase of belongings and dotted them around the flat. The Wisteria on the mantlepiece is replaced with a photo of the entire Howell family, at Christmas, matching jumpers, back when Dan had longer hair and not as many lines around his eyes. Phil stares like it still is a Monet, like it’s a masterpiece.

“That’s you” he says. 

Dan says “that’s me.”

Phil surveys the huge space in the middle of the room. “A piano will fit in here, right?”

“Yes. And, by the way, I can’t believe you asked for a piano instead of the reward money.”

Phil says “I said I’d get you one.” 

“Bit sudden isn’t it? We’ve only just met.”

Phil gives him a fond look. “Well first a piano then other stuff. And whatever else I said.”

“I remember that I said ‘other stuff?’ and you said -”

“I said _everything_ , Dan, that’s what I said” Phil says and kisses him.

Dan sighs into it, threads his fingers into Phil’s hair and probably clings a little too hard but then Phil is too, they’re probably both going to be covered with fingertip bruises for days. 

Phil pulls at Dan’s shirt, at his waist, grabs his hands then drops them, touches his hair, his jawline, traces the curve of his ear, smooths the gap between his eyebrows, where there was a frown once but there isn’t anymore, constantly moving like he always does. Dan stays still, basks in it, lets Phil check that he’s exactly as he left him.

Dan says “I’m glad you came back” against Phil’s cheek, but loud enough for Phil to hear it. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t.”

“I came back. I was always going to come back.”

Dan says “I never want to be anywhere you’re not” into Phil’s shoulder, again making sure Phil can hear. “Ever again. Ever.”

~*~

Pressed against the wall of his bedroom Dan suddenly realises that his hands are shaking too much to unbutton Phil’s shirt. Which matches the tremble of Phil’s fingers against his jawline.

He pulls back, to which Phil makes a needy little whine noise that Dan wouldn’t mind hearing again, but “maybe it’s too much. For right now.”

Phil says “it always feels like too much” and catches Dan’s hands in his own. “We’ve got loads of time. Forever. We can come back to that. Let’s just -”

They sleep tangled up in each other, Phil making contented little noises into the crook of Dan’s neck, and Dan almost has another flashback, another memory bustling into his mind, uninvited, but he pushes it back.

There will be no more flashbacks, no more echoes. Phil says something under his breath and Dan thinks, this is now. You’re real and you’re here. I put it right.

~*~

They weren’t going to talk about it but Dan sort of wants to. On the balcony, Phil entranced by all the hanging baskets, he says “I wanted to tell you about the plan, but that would have -”

Phil, brushing his fingers against the begonia petals, says “it’s best you didn’t. I’m a terrible actor and would have had too much time to think about it.”

“And to worry?”

“I wouldn’t have _worried_ , not about myself” Phil leans into him “when I saw the Van Gogh, I couldn’t believe you’d done it. But then it made sense, all the putting it right stuff. I wanted to come to wherever you’d gone and tell you what an utter idiot you were. But also that I love you.”

Dan instantly replies “I love you too.”

“Well, that’s okay then. Would have been awkward if it was just me” Phil drops a tiny, feather light, kiss to Dan’s head. “Now, let’s never talk about this again.”

~*~

In the kitchen, where Felix had replaced all the expensive appliances with ones from Argos, trying to make tea with Phil plastered to his back (not even really doing anything, just not wanting Dan to be too far away).

Dan says “stay.”

Phil says “always” right into his ear and Dan gives up making the tea completely.

~*~

They go for dinner with Louise, who is her usual charming self and says “Phil, I’ve heard a lot about you”.

Phil, completely overwhelmed by meeting one of Dan’s friends, says “really?” in a disbelieving way and, when he’s not looking, Louise turns to Dan and clutches her cheeks to express that Phil is too adorable for life. 

Dan introduces him to PJ, in the bar when PJ’s back from Boston. PJ says “Phil. At last. Nice to meet you.”

Phil looks perturbed by the ‘at last’ and sits with PJ at the bar while Dan plays, keeping an eye on them both as Phil isn’t great with meeting new people.

They send notes even though it’s not a Thursday. PJ requests the most random, unheard of, songs that are impossible to play. Phil sends little doodles of made-up creatures, things in the flat, other people in the bar - things to make him smile.

Which he always does, missing a note. He says, into the microphone, “sorry guys. My boyfriend is at the bar, being distracting.”

Everyone says “aww” and Phil, raises his hand, face lighting up like the sun hitting the bluest waves, sparkling.

~*~

(Dan Skypes Mark and says “hey, look who I found.”

Phil, bouncing into shot, says “actually I found him.”

Mark, utterly delighted, says “I’m sure you did.”

Dan doesn’t comment on the fact that wherever Mark is looks far warmer than Ohio. He also pretends not to notice the painting behind him.

Mark says “hi Phil. It’s great to actually see you. And you too Dan. Looking so happy”)

~*~

Dan says “stay.”

Phil says “always” automatically, then “what? Here?”

Dan says “here. Here with me.”

And so the Camden flat gains a DVD collection, some stuffed anime characters, some huge photo frames, a Tetris lamp, and a Phil. 

A Phil who is always there when Dan comes home from work even though it’s late (if he doesn’t manage to stay awake he leaves notes). A Phil who comes to the bar on Fridays and cheers obnoxiously loudly to anything Dan plays. A Phil who got him a piano, and doesn’t complain about the amount of space it takes up, just that “wow it looked smaller. In the hall”. A Phil who smooths the frown in Dan’s eyebrows until it’s completely wiped away.

~*~

Phil gets invited back to the Manchester gallery, a few months later, to celebrate the safe return of their Van Gogh. Neither of them want to go but Phil accepts because of his perfect manners and wanting to be _polite_.

Dan says “I left without working my notice period, that’s going to look awkward. And my whole new name thing.”

He shouldn’t have worried. No one remembers him, or his name. Phil says “well you never spoke to anyone.”

Dan says “I spoke to you.”

“That was different. I hope” Phil is wearing blue, because he knows Dan likes it. He’s standing slightly behind Dan, trying to get Dan to block him from the view of everyone else in the room. “Maybe we shouldn’t have come. There’s more people than I thought.”

The Van Gogh has a crowd in front of it the entire time. Phil gets his hand shook a lot by people who’ve obviously forgotten about how they treated him back when it actually went missing, gets pulled away into a number of private conversations. Dan stays where he is and drinks most of the champagne supply himself. 

When it’s starting to wind down Phil says “I asked if we could see the painting by ourselves” and so they stay behind while the rest of the party leaves.

Phil grabs Dan’s hand and pulls him towards the painting. The Sea at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Beautiful in the evening, illuminated only by the light above it. 

Blue of the waves reflecting the blue of Phil’s eyes. Dan is aware that he probably has the normal, zoned out, look on his face. Phil definitely does.

Dan says “I remember standing here waiting for you. The first time.”

“I stood here waiting for you _all_ the time” says Phil. 

“I don’t think it’s a lonely painting anymore, for the record.”

~*~

Phil said “PJ said he’s never seen you so happy” when they’re walking back from the bar, crunching over the September leaves.

Dan looked over and said “that’s what Chris said to me.”

(Chris had said it again, meeting Dan as Dan. He’d actually given the hurt him and I’ll hurt you talk this time, but Dan can accept that he deserved it. Chris said “I’m not going to question you, about the name thing. About why you left. He’s forgiven you, I only care about him being happy. And he is.")

Phil said “well that’s lucky isn’t it. Almost like we make each other happy.”

Dan said “ _happiest_.”

Phil smiled at him, his there you are smile, and said “happiest. It’s about time too.”

~*~

Phil, casually, in front of a painting that Dan once stole, says “so, what’s the best thing you’ve ever rescued?”

Dan frowns at him. They don’t really talk about that, haven’t talked about that in months. 

Phil says “don’t say me.”

“I wasn’t going to. You never needed rescuing, you rescued me.”

“That’s not true Dan, you rescued yourself.”

(there’s a new photo frame in their living room now. It’s filled with photos of them; in Japan, in Las Vegas, in New York, Dan sat at pianos, Phil with an assortment of pancakes/waffles/cakes, under cherry blossoms, at dinner, on nights out, on nights in, in accidentally matching plaid, with Phil’s friends, with Dan’s friends, with _their_ friends, their families. The only photo that isn’t of them is a postcard of a Van Gogh, haphazardly stuck in one corner. They don’t try and explain that to people)

(with smiles that match. The same eye crinkling joy, overwhelmed completely by how much they’re enjoying life. Dan is never looking at the camera, he is always always looking at Phil)

Dan says “maybe I did.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honorable mentions to the five paintings to sum up this fic: 
> 
> Van Gogh's [The Sea at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (Phil version)](http://www.vangoghreproductions.com/paintings/1888-19-1.jpg/)  
> Van Gogh's [Fishing Boats at Saintes Maries (Dan version)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Fishing_Boats_at_Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.jpg)  
> Cleve Gray's [Whisper](http://www.artandantiquesmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/201309_gray_01.jpg)  
> Edward Hopper's [Automat](http://www.edwardhopper.net/images/paintings/automat.jpg)  
> Van Gogh's [Almond Blossoms](https://lh3.ggpht.com/DOiW-SivcUWk2bZCJs3bpmc6guKUUMbHLjInj4oCtNA7CjFYBhMRw-h8BSN2pANRKSWCwwZE2ws3vKk9vmVeGaVo3gfVIBrDwCsbFHN3)
> 
> The vast majority of facts about the paintings mentioned, their whereabouts and the Tate in general (especially its location and layout) have been exaggerated for the purpose of this fic. 
> 
> (thank you for all the lovely comments. I could honestly have dragged this to about 40 chapters with how much I enjoyed writing it but here it is, complete :D)


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